The Streets – Loud And Quiet 161

Armand Hammer, CMAT, Wilco & Cate Le Bon, MJ Lenderman, Mabe Fratti, Vagabon, Ratboys, Courtney Barnett, Maple Glider, Jaakko Eino Kalevi, Max Winter, Nyege Nyege, Shaun Ryder, A. Savage

issue 161

Movie madness

The Streets

the debut album

PRAYERS & PARANOIA 27.10.2023 stream the lead single SOBER now On tour in November - dates & tickets at sipho.me

Contents Contact info@loudandquiet.com advertise@loudandquiet.com Loud And Quiet Ltd 445 Hackney Road London E2 9DY Founding Editor: Stuart Stubbs Deputy Editor: Luke Cartledge Designer: Ed Seymour Art Direction: B.A.M. Contributing writers Alastair Shuttleworth, Alexander Smail, Andrew Anderson, Ben Lynch, Colin Groundwater, Dafydd Jenkins, Daniel Dylan Wray, Dominic Haley, Dhruva Balram, Fergal Kinney, Gemma Samways, Guia Cortassa, Hamza Riaz, Hayden Merrick, Ian Roebuck, Isabel Crabtree, Jack Doherty, Jake Crossland, Janne Oinonen, Jasleen Dhindsa, Jazz Brown, Jenessa Williams, Jessica Wrigglesworth, Joe Goggins, Jumi Akinfenwa, Kyle Kohner, Leo Lawton, Max Pilley, Michelle Kambasha, Mike Vinti, Nadia Younes, Natalia Quiros Edmunds, Ollie Rankine, Oskar Jeff, Orla Foster, Robert Davidson, Reef Younis, Sam Walton, Shrey Kathuria, Skye Butchard, Sophia McDonald, Susan Darlington, Theo Gorst, Tom Critten, Tristan Gatward, Zara Hedderman, Zhenzhen Yu Contributing photographers Andrew Mangum, Annie Forrest, Cielito Vivas, Dan Kendall, Eleonora C. Collini, Emily Malan, Gabriel Green, Gem Harris, Henri Kisielewski, Jake Kenny, Jody Evans, Jonangelo Molinari, Kyle Johnson, Levi Mandel, Mathew Scott, Matt Swinsky, Matilda Hill-Jenkins, Phil Sharp, Sophie Barloc, Timothy Cochrane, Tom Porter With special thanks to Anastasia Roe, Alex Cull, Ben Harris, Chris Cuff, Dan McCormick, Duncan Clark, Frankie Davison, Jamie Woolgar, James Parrish, Jodie Banaszkiewicz, Jon Lawrence, Tim Vigon

The views expressed in Loud And Quiet are those of the respective contributors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the magazine or its staff. All rights reserved 2023 Loud And Quiet Ltd.

ISSN 2049-9892 Printed by Gemini Print Distributed by Loud And Quiet Ltd. & Forte

Issue 161 The Streets had an extreme effect on me when Mike Skinner released Original Pirate Material in 2002. Desert Island Discs levels of obsession and influence, like it has been for a lot of people my age, who were nearly 20 back then. So when I started Loud And Quiet in 2005, Skinner was my dream cover interview, and has been pretty much ever since. I really don’t say that lightly, and feel that we’ve really lucked out in getting him not then but now, as he releases the first Streets album in 12 years, and – ridiculously, although not for Skinner – a completely DIY debut feature film.

Stuart Stubbs

Vagabon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Maple Glider . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 Max Winter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Ratboys . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 MJ Lenderman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 Armand Hammer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 Mabe Fratti . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 A. Savage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 Reviews . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 The Streets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 Courtney Barnett . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62 Nyege Nyege . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 The Rates: CMAT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70 In Conversation: Wilco & Cate le Bon . . . 74 My Place: Jaakko Eino Kalevi . . . . . . . 78 03

The Beginning: Previously

Since the last edition of Loud And Quiet

Injury Reserve become By Storm At the start of August, Phoenix experimental hip hop innovators Injury Reserve announced that they were retiring the IJ name and releasing their new music as By Storm. Founding member and “the heart of the band” Stepa J. Groggs tragically passed away in 2020, and this was the first work that the surviving duo of Ritchie With A T and Parker Corey had made together since (although final Injury Reserve album By The Time I Get To Phoenix was released after Groggs’ death, it had been pretty much finished before that).

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The release came in the form of a film featuring ‘Bye Storm’, the final track from ...Phoenix, and ‘Double Trio’, their first song under the new name. It’s a really powerful piece of work, and there’s no specific plan for what comes next – this isn’t the start of a new album campaign. As they told us themselves in an exclusive interview published as the release went live, “Sometimes a minute-long song can be more to chew on than most albums. We wanted to pay respect to the history of the band.”

You can read the full interview, watch the film and hear the music on our website. loudandquiet.com.

The Beginning: Previously Snoop Dogg × Nicki Minaj × Call of Duty

Kim Gordon

It’s the news all hip hop heads and gamers have been waiting for: Nicki Minaj is now a playable character on Call of Duty. The Activision first-person shooter franchise have added Minaj, Snoop and 21 Savage to Modern Warfare 2 and Warzone as part of their fifth season, for their celebration of 50 years of hip hop, and the most important fact about it all is that Snoop has his own finishing move called “Finishizzle Movizzle”. There’s a really funny advert for it all starring the in-game Nicki stamping on soldiers’ heads in massive high heels.

Alternative music icon Kim Gordon, known for her pioneering work with Sonic Youth, Body/Head and as a solo artist, just hosted a major closet sale to raise money for Downtown Women’s Center, an LA charity supporting women who are experiencing or having been through homelessness. It was hosted at the end of August at Submission Beauty, also in LA, so you’ve already missed it, or you might be sat reading this looking way cooler than you have any right to.

BRIT School North Croydon’s BRIT School is well-known as a hotbed of creative talent; as a specialist performing arts college, alumni who have benefited from its high standards of creative education and facilities include Amy Winehouse, Black Midi, King Krule, Kae Tempest, Katy B, Raye, Imogen Heap, FKA Twigs, Adele and many more. It is selective in admissions but it is locally-focused and does not charge fees, receiving significant funding from both the UK government and the record industry (represented by the British Phonographic Industry). Now, plans have been announced to open BRIT School North in Bradford, the West Yorkshire city that’s set to become City of Culture in 2025. It’s no secret that the creative industries are disproportionately concentrated in London, so this is a welcome move; mayor of West Yorkshire, Tracy Brabin, said: “This is a fantastic win for the North and supports our ambition to ensure opportunities for all, no matter where you’re from or where you live.”

Bat For Lashes London-based songwriter Natasha Khan, better known as Bat For Lashes, has announced Motherwitch, an “illustrated oracle deck” in collaboration with London wellness brand She’s Lost Control. Khan began working on the illustrations that would form the basis of the deck in the 2020 lockdown, while she was pregnant: “Images started to circle around my mind and dreams,” she says. “Female characters in all their different guises and glory: Witches, sisters, sirens, mothers, angels, death hags. I was trying to make sense of my evolving womanhood and conjuring as many archetypes as I could to help me on my journey of transformation.” Part tarot reinvention, part a contemporary version of Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies cards, the 40-strong deck can be preordered now for £65, with various bonuses available. sheslostcontrol.co.uk

Nick Cave × ChatGPT Nick Cave had a big rant about ChatGPT earlier in the year, but he’s come around to it now apparently, using it to help fans “navigate my immense back catalogue” by making playlists of his work, thus making him some cash. More on this as we get it.

illustration by kate prior

Ten Minute Tales South London poet and storyteller Sam Golding, a fixture of the DIY scene underpinned by organisations like Sister Midnight Records, How To Catch A Pig and Solidarity Tapes, is the creative force behind cult Instagram page Ten Minute Tales, which proceeds from the neat idea of encouraging followers to write something – anything – in ten minutes, with no prep time before or editing process afterwards, then submitting to be read by the public. He’s now published a book based on stuff he’s run on the Instagram page, Ten Minute Tales Vol 1, and begun to release music, and it’s all worth checking out if you’re into bands like Goat Girl, leather.head, Squid and more – he’s published or collaborated with all of them. instagram.com/tenminutetales

Tom Verlaine When Television frontman and New York City counterculture legend Tom Verlaine passed away aged 73 earlier this year, he left behind an enormous collection of books – an estimated 50,000 of them, a significant proportion of which were purchased from independent booksellers and dollar carts around NYC. Now bookshops Better Read Than Dead and Capitol Hill have teamed up to begin shifting the collection at discount prices, in order to redistribute them to “the readers and dealers of his city”, which can only be good news for local independent shops and lovers of literature. The first wave was sold off in August, but there’s much more to come – keep an eye on their website to hear about it first. betterreadthandeadbooks.com

Fyre Festival Remember Fyre Festival? That really really good one that definitely happened? Well, it’s back. Organiser Billy McFarland came up with the genius idea to give it another go while in solitary confinement, having been rewarded for the roaring success of the previous event with a prison sentence. It’s set to happen at some point next year allegedly, somewhere in the Caribbean – you know, the sea that hundreds of people were stranded in the middle of thanks to McFarland last time around, having been promised a festival on “the boundaries of the impossible” (which was sort of true if you think about it) by Bella Hadid and Kendall Jenner in the promo video. 100 idiots have already snapped up the first wave of presale tickets for $499 each, with more on sale soon for some reason.

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The Beginning: Losing My Edge

We asked Shaun Ryder what his favourite song is, really DH: SR:

DH: SR: DH: SR: DH: SR:

DH: SR:

DH: SR:

DH: SR:

Hi Shaun! We’re here to talk about your favourite so– Now you see, already, this isn’t my favourite thing to do.

My ADHD brain doesn’t really allow me to have just one fucking song. What did I pick again?

It says here that you picked ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ by the Rolling Stones.

Did I? Yep. I suppose you want to know why I picked it, don’t you?

Yeah. Is that alright?

I mean, I love all sorts of things in all sorts of different genres; I have so many different favourite songs, it’s hard to pick just one. ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ just always gets in my brain because it’s the perfect length for a pop song in the charts or if it’s playing on a jukebox or something like that.

I know what you mean; it’s definitely one of those songs that get stuck in your head.

It’s one of those songs that’s always been there, isn’t it?

It was on the jukebox down the local when we were kids; in fact, one of my earliest memories is Tony Blackburn playing it on his show in the fucking ’60s or early ’70s. It’s always been around.

What do you like most about it?

I’m not really good with this sort of shit, mate. You’re not going to get any wonderful explanations out of me, like descriptions of the riffs or what key it’s in, mainly because I have no fucking clue. I don’t have the same wide range vocabulary of, like, what do you call it? A music journalist.

It’s just a song I like, y’know? It’s groovy. I like the guitar licks on it. I like Bill’s bass. Jagger sounds great on it.

That’s fine. You can enjoy a song just because it’s good.

What’s wrong with that?

Yeah, it’s just perfect. It’s a perfect fucking pop song.

DH: SR: DH:

SR:

DH:

SR: DH: SR: DH: SR:

DH:

DH: SR: DH: SR:

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So I’m guessing you’re more of a Stones guy than a Beatles guy?

Beatles, Stones, The Kinks, Motown, I like everything. Like I said, it’s impossible to choose just one.

One of the things I hate about music is that everyone forces you to choose between the Stones and The Beatles like they’re football teams or something. You’re allowed to like both.

Yeah, I won’t have it. I absolutely love both bands. The only thing that the Stones really have over The Beatles is that if you want to, you can still go and see them live, mostly because most of The Beatles are dead.

Even when Lennon and Harrison were alive, they stopped touring and playing live shows back in ’69, right? I guess the best most people can do now is see Macca.

That’s true. I’ve never seen Paul McCartney, though.

You’ve seen the Stones, then?

Oh yeah. I actually went to my first Rolling Stones gig with Ronnie and Keith.

No way!

I don’t really remember a lot about it. It was in the ’90s, and it was all sort of weird back then, but we ended up going to a gig because we were hanging out with the Stones a lot at the time. I’m pretty sure we were in LA, but it could also be London. But I do remember riding with them to the show and watching them play from the side of the stage.

I remember there were all these tents and fairground rides set up outside their gig; it was like a fucking carnival or something.

So you actually got to hang out with them quite a bit, then?

SR: Yeah, it was when we did that first Black Grape album.

Ronnie’s kids and Keith’s kids loved the album, and me and Danny Saber met up with them and, I think, one of Keith’s sons. Danny ended up working on some Stones stuff and Stones remixes because they liked the record. In fact, we sat and listened to that first Black Grape album about ten times with Keith and Ronnie in an apartment somewhere.

What did they reckon?

They just kept saying “put it on” over and over again. It was fucking great.

I mean, that’s high praise. They’re like the last of the proper rock stars.

You know what, they’re the only people I’ve ever let sit talking to me and absolutely rip the fucking piss out of me.

They just had proper fucking rock star vibes, if you know what I mean. They even spoke like fucking rock stars, with this sort of laid-back English-American “yeah man” kind of accent going on. It was wild, man, if you know what I mean?

words by dominic haley

DJANGO DJANGO

CHRISTINE AND THE QUEENS PARANOÏA, ANGELS, TRUE LOVE (OUT NOW)

ALUNA

OFF PLANET (OUT NOW)

MYCELiUM (OUT NOW)

SHYGIRL

PARCELS

NYMPH (OUT NOW)

LIVE VOL. 2 (OUT OCT 20)

BECAUSE MUSIC

LSDXOXO

DELUSIONS OF GRANDEUR EP (OUT NOW)

The Beginning: Bad Advice

‘The Weeknd’ on acting

Dear Abel. Like you, I love to tread the boards, but one thing I’m struggling with is crying on demand as I suffer from a medical deficit of human emotion or empathy. What are your tips for getting the tears flowing when required? – Bobby Crumpet, Huddersfield Ah, my darling Robert. I recall Branagh requesting my advice on this when we staged the Scottish play together down in Broadstairs all those years ago. I’ll tell you what I told him: simply purchase one of my exclusive, limited edition vapes with its signature pepper spray fragrance, and give it a good huff shortly before your scene. Once you’ve finished spluttering, there’ll be plenty of tears to spare – not a dry eye, nose or throat in the house. And be very, very drunk.

Like everyone, I thought The Idol was a seminal work. What is your next dramatic engagement please, Mr Tesfaye? – Richard Pictures, Runcorn You’re too kind, but entirely correct of course. Well, I may be appearing in a new interpretation of Phantom for the Chichester festival, and my agent is currently enquiring about a part for me in a new play that the fabulous Shaun Williamson is working on, which I believe is called something like Jack and His Big Stalk, to play across the winter period in Blackpool. Before all that though, I shall be portraying the great Mike Bassett in the semi-fictionalised sequel to the daring, important 2001 Michael Moore documentary, England Manager.

Mr Weeknd, tell me: what’s been your most audacious method-acting project? – Sandra Bollock, Shap Well, one wag once suggested to me that it was my

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decade-long depiction of a global pop star, before dropping the act to return to my authentic self in The Icon. Oh, how McKellen makes me laugh. Anyway, jesting aside, I don’t go method, you silly prick. As I once asked Dustin Hoffman after he’d put himself through the wringer preparing for some part or another, “Why don’t you try acting, dear boy?” At least, I think I said that. It might have been Nicholas Lyndhurst. I was very, very drunk.

Dear Abel, what are your acting superstitions? Personally, I carry a rabbit’s foot with me on stage whenever possible. And I also have some superstitions. – Reginald Dwight, Glossop Always say “break his legs” rather than “go on”. Never utter the name of Shakespeare’s Scottish play, McManaman.

Give whichever ghoul is haunting the rafters of your theatre a sturdy kick in the groin whenever they appear as a matter of respect, particularly if it’s Andrew Lloyd Webber. Try not to scream “Gigi Hadid!!!” more than once per performance. Never wash your lucky pants. Always wear your lucky pants.

Abel, my darling – I struggle terribly with my nerves prior to auditions. Like so many artistes, I simply yearn to be loved! How do you cope with such anxieties? – Vinny Jones, Milton Keynes Oh Vincent, Vincent, Vincent, you think I audition? Goodness me. The last time I auditioned for anything was while I was studying Stanislavski in my youth; I never did hear back from The Bill. My advice would be to prepare assiduously, to know the part intimately, to study my bravura performance in The Idol on repeat for 12 to 15 days prior to your audition, and to be very, very drunk.

illustration by kate prior

NEW ALBUM OUT 29th SEPTEMBER

The best thing Lætitia Tamko ever did was fly to rural Germany to grieve in solitude and let the ideas come to her,

by Gemma Samways. Photography by Emily Malan

Vagabon Lætitia Tamko isn’t sure where to call home right now. “I’m a bit all over the place,” the artist better known as Vagabon chuckles.

For the time being at least, she’s in LA – a temporary base that she’s been alternating with brief spells in New York.

With European dates opening for Arlo Parks and Weyes Blood set for September and November, plus a US headline tour in support of her new LP booked for October, Tamko won’t be laying down any permanent roots in the near future. Not that she’s especially phased by feelings of disorientation anymore.

After all, when her family relocated from Cameroon to the US in the mid-’00s, Tamko spoke almost no English, and within a few years she was studying computer programming and performing original music in her second language.

Call it a survival technique, call it a personality trait, but there’s always been an underlying stoicism to Tamko. A keen collaborator and a veteran of Brooklyn’s DIY indie scene alongside songwriters like Mitski and Frankie Cosmos, she’s always been intensely sociable. And yet, when faced with emotional turmoil, she maintains that she’d rather seek solace in solitude than in community. It’s a preference that was truly put to the test following the sudden death of her close friend, the musician Eric Littmann, in June 2021.

“It felt like all eyes were on me,” she says, shifting uncomfortably in her seat as she recalls loved ones rallying around her.

“They were trying to console me but what I really needed in that moment was time to process. I needed to be somewhere I felt really isolated; because it was all so unbearable I almost wanted to run away from it.”

Tamko found breathing room some 3500 miles away, subletting a friend’s house in a remote lakeside village in north Germany. Freed from her daily routine, phone signal and the obligation to interact socially, she dedicated her time to simple tasks like walking in the forest or preparing meals. And to her surprise, having headspace allowed “ideas to pour in.”

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“They were trying to console me but what I really needed in that moment was time to process”

“Without the distractions, I found the thing I wanted to do most was play piano or make something on my computer or write,” she says. “Before I knew it, I had a collection of songs coming together that would eventually become Sorry I Haven’t Called.”

Though dedicated to Littmann, Tamko’s third album isn’t the heavy exploration of grief you might expect; rather, it’s a reaction to it. Building on the bold production choices of 2019’s self-titled effort, Sorry I Haven’t Called pairs vivacious, pop-focused melodies with a newfound lyrical directness that mirrors the open, instinctive approach Tamko is now taking to life. In essence, it’s an album about being emotionally present in every experience, good or bad, because what else do any of us have but now?

Speaking about this shift in priorities, she explains: “Grief feels like this secret club that no one really wants to be a part of.

There’s so much disquiet, and one of the main things that I found was that I didn’t even remotely care about the stuff I used to care about. It made me feel like I was a newborn child or something.

And I’m really proud of translating that feeling on this record, creating something that is playful but also complex.”

Lead single ‘Carpenter’ is emblematic of this approach.

Created with Rostam Batmanglij (Carly Rae Jepsen, HAIM) it pairs a gambolling melody inspired by South African house music with lyrics addressing personal growth. “I wasn’t ready to pull me out / I wasn’t ready to move on out,” she coos in the chorus, before calmly asserting, “But I’m all ready now.”

“I was still parsing out this introspection, unsure of how to talk about what I was feeling without going too deep,” Tamko says of the song’s genesis. On ‘Can I Talk My Shit?’, it feels like she’s figured out the balance. Propelled by a puckish joy, it finds Tamko chiding, “I’m way too high for this,” over a dubby bass groove, before building layers of feather-light harmonies and glittering synth arpeggios.

‘Made Out With Your Best Friend’ is even more flirtatious, its skittering beats and chopped vocal samples building momentum for the mischievous kiss-off, “And he loved it”. As Tamko explains with a grin, the album’s title is intended in a similarly unapologetic tone: “It’s more like, sorry I haven’t called but I’ve been busy living my life.”

S

ONICALLY, TAMKO’S LIFE-LONG love of dance music provided the main inspiration for the album. It’s an interest she first explored professionally via the bedroom house of 2019 single ‘Water Me Down’. But following Littmann’s untimely passing, the sanctity of the dancefloor suddenly took on a whole new significance: “Just dancing in the dark was an incredibly

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huge source of joy for me in my grief and I wanted to replicate that experience.”

Returning from Germany with an album’s worth of demos, Tamko sought out collaborators who could facilitate her vision, including Rostam, Casey MQ (Oklou, Eartheater) and Teo Halm (Rosalía, SZA). When asked to define her role in the process today, she settles on ‘Executive Producer’, with the caveat she’s a little uncomfortable with the term.

“I made my thesis and I figured out who I wanted to be on this album based on what I know they do well,” she reasons, slipping back into science kid parlance. “Being from an engineering background of math and hardware, I like tangible things.

Feelings aren’t tangible, but production and instruments are. So it was like, ‘Casey’s really good at these beautiful inversions of chords,’ or, ‘Rostam is really good at like blending analogue and electronic elements.’”

That’s not to say Tamko has entirely abandoned the unvarnished honesty of her 2017 debut Infinite Worlds. ‘Autobahn’ evokes the intimacy of Immunity-era Clairo, its muted keys tightly hugging the vocal melody. Likewise, the melancholic indie-rock of ‘Anti-Fuck’ is relatively frill-free, bar some artfully squalling guitar distortion. Both songs tackle the collapse of a romantic relationship she formed while in Germany, though the latter features the ambiguous refrain, “Forget enough to love what you remember.”

Throughout, she can trace her growth as a lyricist. “I think I’ve always been thinking about the poetry of words in a more formal, ‘Ok, let’s sit down and write’ way... But with Sorry I Haven’t Called I’ve found the poetry in conversation; the romance and the humour that there is in those daily interactions. Also, even when I’m talking about something difficult, I can still come to it in this assured state of abundance. You know, that it isn’t the end of the world, and it really never was.”

This sense of perspective is the main gift that she has taken from the painful experiences of the past few years, ultimately facilitating a level of self-awareness that has proven transformative.

“I’ve really changed a lot through bereavement and grief counselling,” she nods. “I’m not so critical of myself anymore, because there’s simply no time to be. You know, none of us have time.”

For a spell after Littmann’s death, Tamko thought she might have lost her sense of ambition. “I almost went, none of this matters,” she recalls. “Like, who cares if I make an album?

But I realised that my goals had just changed. For me, connection and friendship and community and love are the only important things in life. But they can exist within my work too: I no longer have to choose one or the other.”

Maple Glider When Tori Zietsch goes into town from rural Australia she becomes someone else,

by Leo Lawton “I have a sensitive energy. I’m conscious of how much I’m out in the world because I’m really affected by it. I need time alone.”

Maple Glider is the sonic pseudonym of Australian born musician and singer Tori Zietsch. When referring to her performative double, admittedly in a surprisingly detached way, Zietsh laughs as she says: “I swear to God that lady has too many outfits.” She playfully represents a fascinating dualism which most of us embody, a kind of split characterisation between, on the one hand, our flamboyant ambitious selves, and on the other, our gentle sheltered introversions. The trouble for most of us is

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that we can’t choose which side will present itself throughout the week. Not the case for Zietsch, who splits her time between smalltown café work and farming, having recently moved to a very rural part of Australia. She says: “I need nature, space and quiet. When I’m not playing shows, I’m in bed by 9pm!” On the weekend, she heads into the city as a totally different person, equipped only with a suitcase full of whacky outfits and a fake microphone, which is in fact a large pink dildo. She giddily admits: “I could not keep up with Maple Glider full time, that’s for sure. It’s a form of expression.”

Zietsch is on the cusp of releasing her second full length record, I Get Into Trouble, a softly spoken, gorgeously eloquent battle against childhood indoctrination and adulthood relational trauma. The title refers to a bible story based on a condemned, sexually assaulted girl named Dinah, who is also the protagonist to one of Maple Glider’s singles from the record. “I’ve really struggled to reflect on my own experiences with the church as a kid, having those ideas ingrained into me at such a young age. It’s been painful.”

One of the principle aims of the album is to acknowledge childhood trauma which many of us store in the attics of our minds, subsequently affecting us in adulthood. This is a collection of courageous and matter-of-fact songs that eschew the possibility for Zietsch to hide behind anything at all, aside from her cunning accomplice, Maple Glider. However, she admits that she “certainly didn’t feel confident” when she went into record the album, although she did have a strong intention to reveal even the most personal parts of herself in it. “I had this dragging feeling that these songs, which were so personal to me, and had been difficult to share with anyone, needed to come out and be let go of,” she says. “To some degree releasing these songs has allowed me to move past them mentally and emotionally.” A kind of songwriter’s therapy perhaps.

I’m surprised when she tells me that writing about her issues through song is easier than expressing herself in conversation. It became clear throughout our conversation that Zietsch is perhaps warmer and easier to engage with than she gives herself credit for, which only adds to her charm, not just as a person but as a performer also. She tells me: “Songs are a great vessel for moving through feelings. Once a track is concluded I feel a great sense of empowerment as opposed to the vulnerability I experience before I’ve made sense of the song’s issue in my head. It’s so cathartic to have positive feelings come out of what ultimately started as an intensely dark, emotional place.”

Many of the tracks on I Get Into Trouble are addressed to unnamed individuals, and I was curious to ask whether Zietsch would like for those particular people to hear her through her album. “Some yes, some definitely no!” she says. “I wrote two songs for my brother, which I showed to him. The others are tricky.

I have a lot of fear attached to letting my actual thoughts be heard by some people. I’d like for them to hear them but wouldn’t want to know how they’d react.”

With that, it occurs to me that what is so refreshing about Maple Glider is that there is nothing egocentric at the crux of this character. Ultimately, these songs are for everyone; they exist without a refined, single target. They are beautiful precisely because of their relatability to all.

LAQ006-01 PIGS PIGS PIGS PIGS PIGS PIGS PIGS Terror’s Pillow [Live at Blank Studios]

LAQ006-02 ROBBIE & MONA Tina’s Leather

LAQ006-03 PROTOMARTYR How He Lived After He Died [Live at Sugar Hill Supper Club]

THIS MONTH’S DISC

LAQ006-04 SQUID Sevens [Early writing session, 2021]

LAQ006-05 THE DARKER THE SHADOW THE BRIGHTER THE LIGHT [aka THE STREETS] Don’t Judge The Book

Receive an exclusive flexi disc of a rare track with each edition of Loud And Quiet when you subscribe from £5.50 per month loudandquiet.com/subscribe

Max Winter The artist who graduated from a conservatoire famed for jazz with his own brand of experimental pop, by Jessica Wrigglesworth. Photography

by Martha Treves On his first record, 2021’s One Thousand Lonely Places, London based artist and producer Max Winter combined delicate, ambient piano, virtuosic guitar, fractured techno and eerie, experimental string compositions, leaping from genre to genre while maintaining a thread of melodic coherence throughout.

The album began life as Winter’s final project on his composition course at Trinity Laban, the Greenwich music and dance conservatoire, and ended up being very different to what he’d imagined. “We went into lockdown during my final year, and we all had to completely change what we were thinking of doing,” he tells me. “There was meant to be this big performance and obviously we couldn’t do that anymore.” It was at this point that he began to play with samples his friend IMOGEN had recorded months before. “I started weaving her vocals in and out of the instrumentals and then as I went further along the process I was like, actually, I’ll get her to sing on these tracks.”

The pair have become frequent collaborators, playing on each other’s projects (including Winter’s recent single ‘Lean Into Me’) and sharing a studio, along with producer/DJ Will Lister in a repurposed church in South London. Collaboration, and improvisation, are highly encouraged at Trinity, which has garnered a reputation as a breeding ground for new talent in the jazz world in particular – Moses Boyd, Nubya Garcia, and Ezra Collective are recent alumni. “When I moved to London for uni I was watching people playing jam nights like, ‘wow, I want to be able to do that’, so I practised a lot,” he admits. “But there was also this fear of getting up and doing it – it’s the early stages of uni and everyone’s trying to impress but I remember a lot of people in the audience would be a bit judgmental. I ended up always kind of observing them, but improvisation has been massive in how I write.”

Winter has been writing a lot recently, but his approach has altered since graduating. “I’m getting used to writing music for fun again, rather than for an assignment or a grade. I guess when you’re writing for a record there’s deadlines and stuff, but there’s something about being within music education that can take the fun out of it. It’s nice to try and redevelop that feeling that made me gravitate towards music in the first place.” Lyrically he is branching out too – where previously lyrics were written in a “very systematic way”, cutting up sentences and rearranging until they fit, his new music has come from a more organic place. He says: “There was a part of me that was maybe not quite willing to go deeper than that, and for the first record it really worked. But I’d say with the new stuff… something like

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‘Lean Into Me’, I was like, ‘I’m gonna write about something specific.’ And I think what’s been happening recently is a combination of those two techniques: specifics and then trying to cloud specifics, and playing with that relationship.”

Winter released ‘Lean Into Me’ and another track, ‘O Matter’, in July this year, through tastemaker independent label untitled (recs), home of Jerskin Fendrix, deathcrash, TAAHLIAH and more. The tracks show the breadth of his taste, and talent.

This was a conscious choice, he says: “There were two tracks on my last record that had a nice contrast – one was an energetic, drum heavy song and the other one was a serene, beautiful piece – they were nice templates going forward in terms of the direction I wanted to go in. And I wanted two tracks that did the same thing.”

When we talk, he’s preparing for a gig at The Social, London, where he’ll be playing those among other new songs.

Given he started releasing music during lockdown, he hasn’t had much opportunity to perform his music. “I’m still learning about how I want to be onstage,” he confesses. “I’ve done so much session stuff and playing for other people where there’s like a barrier, it’s not got my name on it. But when it’s my project, I’m still getting to know how to represent me.” Initially, he was playing with 6 band members. “It was a little bit mental – I was trying to recreate the record, which had a lot of elements.

Currently it’s just me, Will [Lister] and my friend Ewan [Moore] who’s a drummer.” This more traditional setup lends itself to a different style of playing. “I’m always gravitating towards guitars, bass and drums. Which is nice, because I like to write outside of those boundaries. I grew up in a very musical house, but it was mostly rock music, which I find funny because I’ve taken this path through contemporary and classical and jazz.

The music that I’ve released dives into various genres, but when I play it live, we end up playing as a rock band. Which I sort of think is at the bed of my soul… it’s what I knew first.”

FMD NEW RELEASES

APOSTILLE ‘Prisoners of Love and Hate‘ Night School LP

Apostille - aka Night School Records’ captain Michael Kasparis - presents his third album with a bang, a bursting ball of NRG, empathy and bristling living.

CARLTON MELTON Turn To Earth‘ Agitated 2LP / 2LP Ltd / CD

Northern California psychedelic sorcerers Carlton Melton are brain surfers, mind trippers, … “psychlists,” if you prefer. The band will take your head for a ride, occasionally rushing at superluminal speeds through a wormhole or gliding softly on a gentle breeze in a leafy glade. Whether psych rock or ambient trance, their sound remains driving, organic, and flowing.

PETER BRODERICK & ENSEMBLE 0 ‘Give It To The Sky: Arthur Russell’s Tower of Meaning Expanded’ Erased Tapes 2LP / 2LP Col / CD

A complete re-recording of Russell’s epic minimalist orchestral composition originally released in 1983.

CATATONIC SUNS ‘Catatonic Suns’ Agitated LP/CD

Catatonic Suns new album sees them blend the underground psychedelia of the late 80s / early 90s Pacific Northwest with the shimmering shoegazery of Britain from the same time.

Heavy and soft guitars, songs that soar, these new recordings verge on the epic. RIYL: The Verve (early), Screaming Trees, Truly, Ride, Slowdive, Alice In Chains.

UPCHUCK ‘Bite The Hands That Feeds’

PAT TODD & THE RANKOUTSIDERS ‘sons of the city ditch’

Channeling the speed of youth and the heaviness of a fleshy, lived life in equal proportion, Upchuck’s second LP, Bite the Hand That Feeds, is a Trojan Horse par excellence, craftily smuggling in waves of sentimental emotion and clever pop songwriting under a veil of pulsing rhythms and scorching riffs.

Produced by Ty Segall.

A resurgent Dog Meat Records is thrilled and proud to release a new album by a resurgent rock'n'roller and an old friend, PAT TODD and his band THE RANKOUTSIDERS. "Pat Todd is a true American Original" - Eddie Spaghetti, The Supersuckers

Famous Class LP/Ltd LP

Dog Meat LP / LP Ltd / CD

MARINA ZISPIN ‘Life and Death – The Five Chandeliers of the Funereal Exorcisms’ Night School LP

Marina Zispin is the negative space between musicians Bianca Scout and Martyn Reid. Love And Death is the duo’s debut release, five chandeliers of melancholic, vibrant synth pop twinkling in the inky blackness.

AKUSMI ‘Lines’ Tonal Union 12”

London based composer, multi-instrumentalist and producer Akusmi announces ‘Lines’, an exhilarating new collection of works born from the desire to take where the acclaimed debut album ‘Fleeting Future’ left off — in search of new forms. “‘Secant’, I must have listened to this tune 3 times in a row, this one soundtracked my night drive through the winding roads” – Benji B, BBC Radio 1

“organic, evergreen loveliness” **** MOJO

WOODS Perennial Woodsist

Dinked Special Edition LP/ LP / CD

A new album of shimmering, loop-driven jeweled pop songs from the beloved folk rock band. info@fortedistribution.co.uk

The Chicago indie-rock band manifesting some weird stuff,

by Jumi Akinfenwa. Photography by Alexa Viscius

Ratboys

Beloved Chicago four-piece Ratboys have been getting their house in order since 2010, and with a loyal following and four studio albums to date, it seems that with their latest, The Window, they’ve arrived somewhere that finally feels like home.

They’ve been working on arrangements since as far back as 2018, so it’s a highly considered piece of work, the songs developing as the band themselves developed as musicians.

“This feels like our first full band record,” says vocalist and guitarist Julia Steiner. “Even though the previous album had that live band sound, this very much feels like the product of a group of people playing together and putting their heads together in a room.”

Forming out of Indiana’s University of Notre Dame before finding their way back to Chicago, Ratboys have garnered critical praise for their releases so far and have toured with the likes of Soccer Mommy and Pinegrove. The Window has ushered in a new era which will see them embark on their first headline tour, armed with some homemade displays made out of old windows that guitarist Dave Sagan proudly shows off during our Zoom call.

Leaving behind the Windy City to record in Seattle’s famed Wall of Justice Recording Studio, which has seen the likes of Nirvana and Sleater Kinney pass through its hallowed halls, the obvious direction would be to go a little bit grunge, but their sound went down a much more unexpected path. “I don’t think we were necessarily trying to channel [those band’s] sound when we were recording there,” Steiner says. “I read a review

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this morning that said we were ‘steeped in the Seattle sound’ while we were recording there, and I think the bigger difference was just getting out of our comfort zone and leaving home and recording in a place where we were fully immersed.”

With Chris Walla, formerly of Death Cab for Cutie, at the helm on production duties, their collaboration came about through the power of manifestation. With a wishlist to rival only that of an eight-year-old armed with a Sharpie and an Argos catalogue, a nudge from their manager to shoot for something bigger, followed by a cold call, led to them getting what they really want. “We did need to get out of our comfort zone. It’s our fourth record, and we were like, let’s just do this thing,” says Sagan.

“Chris was very available in the weeks and months leading up to the studio time,” Steiner continues. “We were in pretty close contact with him, like, sending him practice recordings and brainstorming about the songs and even the logistics of the studio. We were talking all the time going into it. So he already established this baseline level of approachability and relatability. And so I felt really comfortable going in.”

This level of comfort shines through in the music.

Ratboys are arguably making their most expansive yet cohesive work to date, and The Window is the perfect encapsulation of a band that is at peak experimentation, flitting between sardonic power pop to alt-country, to sombre folk and just about everything in between. As a lyricist, Steiner believes that she isn’t good at “writing fiction”, with earnest tales of love and loss peppered throughout, adding to the band’s newfound confidence in their sound.

Collaborating as a quartet for the first time in the full making of the album, the “deeply curious individual” that is Chris Walla brought out a more playful side of the group in the form of a Pandora’s box of studio equipment. “It felt like we were playing a video game and there was just an infinite toolbox of things at the studio,” bassist Sean Neumann laughs. “It was like, open up this drawer and there’s some weird thing in there.

Open up this closet and there’s some weird thing in there. Chris was just such a free-thinking kind of person. It felt very fun to just try things and see if they worked out and there were points where Marcus [the band’s drummer] and I were like waving microphones around just to try to get a more round sound going on. Dave was in a closet waving a talk box tube trying to get some noise in there, and we were playing with swords at one point to get some percussion stuff that had bells attached to them. There was just all this weird stuff in there, it was cool.”

THE BEST NEW MUSIC

ĠENN

UNUM

Liminal Collective

Anglo-Maltese four-piece ĠENN penetrate the alternative scene with their debut album “unum”. The record is a hard-earned statement of evolution, woven from the band’s four distinct threads of influence and identity to reveal an arresting tapestry of ambition.

Fusing hard rock, mediterranean folk, psych, prog rock, trip-hop, post-rock, and pop sensibilities, unum musically pushes the postpunk boundaries...with a sprinkle of lyrical existentialism that reflects the current zeitgeist.

MOLLY BURCH DAYDREAMER Captured Tracks

Brace Yourself Records

JOHN consolidate their reputation as a truly uncompromising force with the release of ‘A Life Diagrammatic’.

Over four albums, the duo of John Newton and Johnny Healey have constantly redefined the parameters of what a guitar and drum twopiece can be, leaving a legacy of some of the most atmospheric noise rock of the past decade.

This is a record that harnesses the punch and intensity of their blistering live shows with the band’s textural, cinematic and expressive sensibilities.

Available on special ’sandstone’ gatefold, exclusive poster and customised architect’s ruler designed by the band.

DAS KOOLIES DK.01

THE MARY WALLOPERS IRISH ROCK N ROLL

Beautifully rich and melodic, ‘Nothing Lasts Forever’ is Teenage Fanclub’s eleventh full studio album.

Four fifths of Super Furry Animals open the door on their debut album as Das Koolies, their technoseamed ‘dream project’. Huw Bunford, Cian Ciarán, Dafydd Ieuan and Guto Pryce restore original Furry vision, with a techno-inspired, heavy-tech sound, inspired by illegal rave roots.

Irish Rock N Roll is due for release on October 6th and follows last year’s hugely acclaimed self-titled debut

PeMa

Molly Burch’s fourth album is brimming with her most infectious pop hooks and stirring ballads to-date, revealing thrilling new depths of songwriting with the help of Jack Tatum’s (Wild Nothing) show-stopping production. ‘Daydreamer’ finds Burch examining her relationship to music. It’s a confrontation of her emotional identity as an artist, making it her most personal album yet.

Limited Edition Cotton Candy coloured vinyl + Sticker Sheet.

Available on White Vinyl at Independent Record Stores.

JOHN A LIFE DIAGRAMMATIC

TEENAGE FANCLUB NOTHING LASTS FOREVER

The band recorded ‘Nothing Lasts Forever’ during an intense ten-day period in the bucolic Welsh countryside at Rockfield Studios, near Monmouth. You can hear the effect of that environment on the record - it’s full of soft breeze, wide skies, beauty and space.

Available on Limited Coloured Vinyl with Mirror board sleeve & CD

JOHN CARPENTER, CODY CARPENTER, & DANIEL DAVIES ANTHOLOGY II (MOVIE THEMES 1976-1988) Sacred Bones

YUSSEF DAYES BLACK CLASSICAL MUSIC

The second volume of Anthology continues the celebration of the illustrious career of legendary filmmaker and composer John Carpenter with an exquisitely sequenced collection of 14 tracks from some of his most groundbreaking films such as They Live, The Thing and the Halloween franchise.

The debut solo studio album from Yussef Dayes “Black Classical Music” is an expansive work that looks set to cement his reputation as a visionary artist. Joined by a range of guests including Masego, Chronixx and Tom Misch, this is a record unrestrained by genre. This is an opus from an artist at the top of his game.

Available on Limited Blue Vinyl & CD at Independent Record Stores

Available on Limited Edition 2LP White Vinyl & CD at Independent Record Stores

Brownswood

Strangetown Records / Amplify

Debut album ‘DK.01’ is released on September 22.

Available on 2LP recycled coloured vinyl

BC Records

If every album an artist makes offers a snapshot of where they stand at that point, then the picture presented by Irish Rock N Roll is one of a band preparing to go stratospheric. It’s an album that manages to perfectly capture the chaos, humour and excitement of the band’s recent live shows whilst also showcasing the incredible emotional of the traditional ballads that they play.

Available on Limited Pink Vinyl & CD

PHAROAH SANDERS PHAROAH Luaka Bop

Pharoah Sanders’ seminal album from 1977.

This limited, embossed 2 LP box set presents the definitive, newly remastered version of PHAROAH. Accompanied by rare archival material, a 24-page booklet, and two previously unreleased live performances of his masterpiece “Harvest Time.”

[Also available as a CD box.]

For seasoned listeners and new acolytes both, PHAROAH will never sound the same.

Support your local independent retailer www.republicofmusic.com

FLAMINGODS HEAD OF POMEGRANATE

The Liquid Label / Amplify Flamingods return with new album ‘Head of Pomegranate’, recorded

by Grammy award-winning producer Ben H. Allen.

Stylistically there are a lot of genres and sounds covered. Weaving through genres of psychedelia, new wave, electronica and punk – often within the same song – is a bit of a specialty for the band, as is their knack for blending in influences from their unique cultural heritages and love of 70s British rock and roll.

Available on pomegranate vinyl and a special limited ‘Island Haze’ edition (with bonus 7” and signed print) & CD

MJ Lenderman The solo musician and Wednesday guitarist in the middle of a thriving music scene in Asheville, North Carolina,

by Joe Goggins. Photographer by William Crooks If you’re familiar with the work of MJ Lenderman it might come as no surprise to discover that his response to recent successes is largely one of quiet bemusement. The singer-songwriter has had a stellar eighteen months or so on two fronts; first, as a solo artist, having released Boat Songs in April of last year, a lo-fi altcountry collection that took his vulnerabilities and lyrical idiosyncrasies and dressed them up smartly, in layers of fuzz and off-kilter melodies; then, there was his work with Wednesday, who have had one of the breakout indie rock successes of this year, with their fifth studio album. Rat Saw God will trouble the business end of many of 2023’s best-of round-ups and deservedly so – Lenderman plays guitar in the band, which is fronted by its principal songwriter, Karly Hartzman.

There are palpable similarities between both the musical sensibilities and the lyrical outlook of Lenderman and Hartz-

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man, who live together in their native North Carolina. From an unassuming house on the outskirts of Asheville, the pair have quietly carved out their own niches within the alt-country canon, reimagining Americana for post-Trump America, and, in Lenderman’s case, evoking the ghosts of his major influences, conjuring visions of what Jason Molina or David Berman might be writing if they were still with us.

After a run of releasing his own material via Dear Life Records in Philadelphia, a label run lovingly by his friends, Boat Songs brought Lenderman to wider attention, and he has now signed, rather fittingly, with ANTI-, an imprint with a roster past and present that strongly marks it out as less a label and more a haven for singular musical oddballs (Cass McCombs, Ezra Furman, Katy Kirby, Neko Case). As if to underline the point, the A&R who brought him to ANTI- is Allison Crutchfield, of Swearin’.

His first output for them winged its way into the world earlier this summer, in the form of a pair of singles: first ‘Rudolph’, a charming, slightly grungy rocker, and then ‘Knockin’, a pretty, bluesy affair. Both tracks suggest Lenderman’s preoccupation with country will inform his music all the more going forwards, and both have an expansiveness that suggests the deal with ANTI- has emboldened him.

“It’s hard to say what the next album will actually sound like,” says Lenderman, who is MJ only to his burgeoning audience – everybody who knows him calls him Jake. “The new songs will sound like me, still. I’ve approached it like a standard rock band again, but there’s some more acoustic instruments in the mix, and there’s some fiddle and some upright bass. A lot of guitars. Nothing crazy.” If it feels as if he’s beginning to nudge beyond the parameters he set for himself on Boat Songs and, before it, 2019’s debut LP, MJ Lenderman, it’s partly because of a modest increase in budget and partly because both of those albums were effectively made under lockdown conditions.

Since then, he’s come to again appreciate the art of collaboration, not least through having worked with Hartzman, an artist with a similarly distinctive style. “I’ve learned a lot about the beauty of working together just from playing in Wednesday,” he explains. “We all write our own parts. My own stuff has always been all written by me, and recorded by me for the most part, but once I started to play live I realised there was something cool about not giving my bandmates too many parts to play. I give them freedom, and that feels like collaboration in its own way.”

It might be Lenderman’s personal relationship with Hartman, though, that has helped to shape him as a songwriter the most. “We live together, and I think that probably means that artistically she’s more of an influence on me than I even know, and vice versa. I didn’t really read that much before I met Karly, and that’s become a big thing for me. I realised she’s a lot more disciplined with her creative projects than I am; she’s always realising her ideas, she’s always working on stuff. So that was inspiring; it got me into better writing habits, for sure.”

T

O HEAR LENDERMAN talk about influences on his writing is beguiling. He carries off his lyricism with a breeziness that can make lines feel throwaway to begin with.

The lyrics that stick with you on the first through runs through Boat Songs are the charmingly everyday ones: on ‘You Are Every Girl to Me’, he chimes, “Jackass is funny, like the earth is round”, whilst on what might be the record’s standout track, ‘Tastes Just Like It Costs’, he spins a seemingly comedic yarn about a couple falling out over the wearing of a stupid hat.

Scratch beneath the surface, though, and you realise that not unlike his heroes – Berman in particular, with Will Oldham being another touch point who springs to mind – Lenderman is adept at using humour and a sort of straight-faced innocence to reveal deeper emotional truths, like the class clown who unexpectedly scores straight A’s when the exam results come out.

‘You Are Every Girl to Me’, really, is swooningly romantic, while ‘Tastes Just Like It Costs’ is actually an astute chronicle of a minor tiff revealing deeper fissures in a relationship.

“It’s not like I’m trying to write…comedy music,” he says, turning the phrase over in his mouth as if wondering whether that’s actually a term. “But the things that are funniest to me tend to be funny because there’s some poignancy or some sadness to them. So it’s important to me, and it’s just a good way to get started on a song, too. I’ll try to open them with a line that’ll make me laugh, and that goes hand in hand with it sounding kind of conversational – like, I won’t use words in a song I wouldn’t use naturally anyway.”

Lenderman’s ideas are expressed nonchalantly, but collated carefully; he is now an avowed bookworm. “I think reading is probably the biggest influence on my writing. It’s part of the cycle, collecting ideas, words and phrases, even things that I might take the meaning of the wrong way, they can still be their own thing in my songs. It keeps me sharp.”

He then refracts his ideas through a kaleidoscopic lens of influences, including the likes of Molina and Berman, but not limited to them. “Especially the later Magnolia Electric Co. records,” he interjects when Molina’s name comes up. “There’s some humorous stuff, some clever wordplay. But another band I really love is Drive-By Truckers; they have a lot of lines that’ll make you laugh, but their stories have a level of sadness and, some of the time, anger to them as well. A lot of movies that I like are like that.”

He cites the iconoclastic American director Todd Solondz as his favourite, he who helmed the likes of Welcome to the Dollhouse, Storytelling and, in Happiness, a strong contender for the title of the blackest comedy ever. “All of his movies play with that kind of thing. Sad, upsetting stories that, I think in his mind, he would consider comedies. A little bit like somebody like Richard Brautigan, the poet and writer, he did all of that too.”

The rise of Lenderman as a solo artist, as well as the gradual emergence of Wednesday as one of indie rock’s hottest properties, had a lot to do with the way in which the Asheville music scene nurtured them. His own community remains close-knit; his drummer lives next door, in a house that Lenderman approximates that every member of his band has called home at some point. As an Asheville native, who until recently was working at the same ice cream shop that he’d been serving cones at since high school, he’s seen the city’s fortunes wax and wane in recent years.

“I never thought about moving away; it’s a great city and a great community,” he says. “But I think it’s harder to grow as a band in Asheville right now, because the venue that was really important to us, The Mothlight, closed over COVID and now there’s nowhere like that space for bands to build, to get great opening spots and get in front of an audience. Our lease is up soon, so we’ve been thinking about places to go, but I’m not sure we’ll move. Everybody we play music with is still here.”

For now, his thoughts turn to the many irons he has in the fire; finishing his first ANTI- record, putting out a live album, playing on the new Waxahatchee record, and touring with Wednesday until at least May of next year. Characteristically, though, he’s laid back about the timeframe for the follow-up to Boat Songs. “It’s likely that I’ll put out my record next year, and then, you know, I want to tour it to the extent that Wednesday have. Beyond that, who knows?”

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Armand

Hammer 22

Billy Woods and Elucid, two of the most creative rappers in NYC, talk about their deepest collaboration yet,

by Dhruva Balram. Photography by Alexander Richter

A distorted voice asks: “How does it feel?”

The seemingly innocuous question placed midway through ‘When It Doesn’t Start With A Kiss’, the fourth song off Armand Hammer’s latest album, We Buy Diabetic Test Strips [WBDTS], reveals itself to ultimately have plagued the NYC duo for a decade – and feels especially pertinent now.

Since their inception a decade ago, Armand Hammer, made up of Billy Woods and Elucid, have known society was heading in a certain direction. They have been warning us about the state of the world. WBDTS feels like the culmination of that prophesying as they look to capture the surrealist absurdity of the current moment.

Over 15 tracks, the duo possesses a sense of propulsive, breathless urgency. They float on top of beats which defy conventional boxes; words tumble out of their mouths faster than they catch them, reminding listeners that they may be the two most intelligent rappers in the game, their bars deserving years of examination. WBDTS is atmospheric, moody and full of twists and turns; a cohesive project which demands multiple listens.

“Previous albums were vignettes, puzzle pieces that fit together,” Woods says over a Zoom call, his voice soft, welcoming. “This album was more back and forth, back and forth in terms of ideas, in terms of collaborators, in terms of beats.

There was a lot of exchange.”

This is epitomised in the album’s incorporation of live instrumentation coupled with featuring an array of innovative producers who took the sessions and chopped and changed them to their fully realised form. Names scattered throughout the album include El-P, JPEGMAFIA, Kenny Segal, DJ Haram and Black Noi$e. Meanwhile, guest vocalists Pink Siifu, Moor Mother, Junglepussy, Cavalier, Curly Castro and Moneynicca – the moonlighting frontman of Philly punk band Soul Glo – are also part of the album.

The album title itself stems from a piece of everyday absurdity, like a Seinfeld episode condensed. “I walk around New York a lot,” says Woods. “And there are these signs that are posted up everywhere. And that was one of the things that I would see: ‘We buy diabetic test strips.’ I was like, ‘What is this?’”

Elucid echoes him, stating: “It’s everywhere. On every lamppost and pole in central Brooklyn. But we were talking to someone else about this, and they don’t live very far from us, a few neighbourhoods over which is much more affluent, and the

signs don’t exist. He’s never seen it before. But it’s ten minutes from his door. It’s just a commentary on the everyday inequity; a question like, ‘What is this?’”

“When I saw that sign,” Woods continues, “I started to think about how there is something here that I don’t understand. Looking into it and seeing how these worlds and economies and realities that are right under all of our noses in the city.

That, you know, for different people, they’re invisible depending on who you are: bottom, top, middle, and there’s different worlds you can move through and things that are going to your eyes sliding right over somebody else.”

W

BDTS IS THE latest offering from a duo who have not only carved a path unto themselves in a cluttered field but developed a sound that is uniquely theirs. In the ten years they have been working together, Armand Hammer has grown to allow each member the necessary space for their quick-fire wit and barbs to come to the fore.

“Woods’ writing has gotten more humorous,” Elucid says.

“I think it’s more detailed and the delivery is slicker.” Woods echoes his bandmate, saying, “I feel like Elucid still writes the way he writes, but maybe now, sometimes there’s more of a tendency to tell a more straight-line story.”

Their collaborative sword was first sharpened when the duo met in 2012. Woods, who runs the label Backwoodz, suggested they form a duo after having Elucid appear on compilations and trading verses with him. Throughout four albums released in as many years, Armand Hammer have honed their joint craft. The LPs Rome, Paraffin, Shrines and Haram each brought something different; each time, they reconsidered how to elevate themselves. It’s an unparalleled run of releases which, it could be argued, peaked with 2021’s Haram. Produced entirely by The Alchemist, the pre-order for the release crashed the Backwoodz website and became their most commercially successful project.

But if anyone is hoping for the formula of Haram to be replicated, Woods and Elucid want to swat those expectations away. With each project comes a new mode of thinking, a new way to tackle the now, and WBDTS is a wholly different beast, which Woods wants to reiterate.

“First of all, Al [The Alchemist] has other things to do,” he quips. “But that’s pretty much how we operate; to try

23

and do something new, find new challenges. We’re definitely excited about doing another record with Al at some point, but, you know, in the meantime, we’re going to push each other and ourselves to new places and new things to bring to the table. I don’t want to be bored. And that way, if I’m not bored, hopefully [other] people won’t be bored.”

Armand Hammer flipped the script on WBDTS. The live instrumentation coupled with the atmospherics and precise lyricism makes it arguably their strongest album – and funniest project – yet. With song titles like ‘Woke Up and Asked Siri How I’m Gonna Die’, the duo trade bars and verses throughout like a high-stakes tennis match, each verse an indicator to see who can do better than the previous one. Yet there is seemingly no competition between them, just two minds in sync. And the trust they have for one another extended to all the creators of the album.

“It was our first time working with [those] people,” Woods says. “It’s much more open conceptually. On Haram, for example, for me at least there’s a lot of different moods happening, even the things that bounce against that, like black sunlight, like black joy.”

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“It’s everywhere. On every lamppost and pole in central Brooklyn. I was like, ‘What is this?’”

“The magic of when the idea starts to come together was super ill to witness,” Elucid says. “That exemplifies the trust.

I think trusting in those moments and being lucky enough to record a few of those, and handing it over to producers, those raw sessions, I’m trusting that I’m going to get a fire pack.”

“It’s these interpersonal relationships,” Woods says. “I think that watching music being made is really cool. And this way, with a room for the players, these people didn’t know each other until they’d walk into the room, and they met each other in the studio for the first time. This is the deepest collaboration that we collectively or individually have had.”

Bendik Giske

Jean-Michel Blais

Pantha Du Prince

WED 4TH OCT GRAND JUNCTION

FRI 6TH OCT VILLAGE UNDERGROUND

Black Country, New Road

Haru Nemuri

TUE 10TH OCT SOLD OUT WED 11TH OCT O2 SHEPHERD’S BUSH EMPIRE

WED 11TH OCT STUDIO 9294

caroline

mui zyu

SAT 14TH OCT KINGS PLACE, HALL 1

THU 26TH OCT ST PANCRAS OLD CHURCH

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Mabe Fratti The Guatemalan cellist and experimental songwriter who unlocked her potential – and learned not to give a fuck – in Mexico City, by Tristan Gatward.

Photography by Timothy Cochrane On a late Wednesday afternoon, the East London sun bends under Café Oto’s daytime awning through wood-framed windows and bounces off the chalk-white walls onto the bookshelf in the corner of the room. Guatemalan-born cellist and composer Mabe Fratti stands inquisitively over it, poring at the spines of essays and novels, pulling them out and placing them back on the shelf. More books are scattered across a big, circular mid-century table to her right – alongside nearnovelty sunglasses and half-drunk drinks – while a smaller,

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more considered pile of books – Anthony Braxton’s Forces in Motion and Manon Burz-Labrande’s Unquiet Tales of Acoustic Weird – rest on the piano. Mabe’s tour manager, Max – a big Dutch man dressed like a cowboy – gently stops a café worker tidying them up as she clears the room of coffee-drinkers ready for soundcheck.

It’s the beginning of Mabe’s two-night residency in Dalston with her band, guitarist Héctor Tosta and drummer Gibrán Androide. The three of them mosey to a seat, speaking like old friends in interchangeable English and Spanish.

Individually, they’re recognised players at the heart of Mexico City’s experimental scene, but it’s Mabe who’s become their overseas emissary. Her presence is immediately studious and warm. It figures, for her solo work to hold the inordinate capacity to venture deep and soar high: tracks like ‘Desde el Cielo’ and ‘Cada Músculo’ from her latest album, Se Ve Desde Aquí, revel in melody, where plaited strands of vocal and cello barely break eye-contact before shattering in a squall of brass and synth. Later this year sees the birth of two new collaborative projects: Titanic – which centres Mabe’s voice over Héctor Tosta’s compositions – and Amor Muere, where Mabe lines up with fellow Mexico City experimenters Gibrana Cervantes, Concepción Huerta and Camille Mandoki. “But we’re all here because of you,” grins Gibrán, as Mabe bashfully contests that she shouldn’t be these projects’ mouthpiece, before reluctantly grinning back.

Her journey to this point has been undulant – a cellist by design, after respiratory problems stopped her playing the saxophone. She started performing with the children’s orchestra in Guatemala, an academy attached to the Sinfónica, which advocated for the accessible learning of classical instruments.

Her self-discovery can be attributed to a CD of new age wolf sounds and an evangelical church that taught her the meditative state of improvisation but thought that she had a demon trapped inside her. She emphasises, all-too-modestly, that she’s only found this measure of success by being available. She bought herself a cheap microphone, and after years of playing in “shitty bands”, a representative of the Goethe-Institut on the hunt for Guatemalan musicians stumbled across Mabe’s Soundcloud recordings and offered her a paid-for residency in Malinalco, Mexico.

“Your map is very limited when you get into a new place, right?” she says. “You cannot travel anywhere without feeling like you’re in a giant city. I knew I needed to go to concerts and

learn about this new scene that we do not have in Guatemala.

It was mind-blowing to go and see. To go to [Mexico City jazz venue] Jazzorca. To go to what was known then as Terraza Monstruo – all these DIY places with this very free music.” Her arms stretch out describing the scale of these clubs and the city’s improvisational scene, where spaces refuse to sell alcohol (it’s a distraction) and nurture musicians as artists rather than employees. She smiles and puts down her glass of wine. “That’s when I started to make friends and feel at home,” she says. “I

“It was nice to hang out with musicians, but it was a neo-pentecostal church.

It gives me cringe” have friends in Guatemala too, of course, but they’re cooks, one is a barrister, one used to work in a zoo. But these people [in Mexico City] were involved in this movement. That’s how I met everyone from Amor Muere, for example, and then a musician who connected me with Héctor from Titanic.

Born into a Christian family, Mabe’s parents weren’t musical but her father used to bring home CDs to inspire her.

“There was either Christian music, Disney music or classical music,” she laughs. “And then he sometimes brought home

new age animal music. Like, wolf sounds. That was really nice. I enjoyed those CDs with the new age and animals. And then once he brought me a Ligeti CD. He didn’t know it was a Ligeti, he just saw the cello player on the cover and thought, ‘Oh this is for Mabe!’ And then when I listened, I was like, ‘What the fuck is this!?’ I was ten years old but the first movement did something to me. I had some perspective of the whole.” When she started playing with the church orchestra as a teenager, her brain was hard-wired to traditional classical music. “It was nice to hang out with musicians, but it was a neo-pentecostal church.” She inhales. “Really lame. It gives me cringe. If you don’t subscribe to an ideology it’s the worst to follow the etiquette of the thing.

I started playing in the middle of my teenage years when I was quite rebellious. My parents were like, ‘Oh lost child’”– she creaks an impression of a stricter voice – “and then I was sent to evangelical school. You know, they thought [ Japanese trading card game] Yu-Gi-Oh! was satanic. They thought that I had a demon. The band was hilarious – very good players actually.

Very good musicians. And then I guess there was no demon inside me. I was exorcised.”

H

ÉCTOR (I LA CATÓLICA) speaks in a slightly higher register, his voice more playful, like the words are little animals jumping around his head before they spill out. He left Venezuela during the political crisis in 2016, working as an administrator at a dining room in Argentina when his brother (“He’s a comedian, a pretty good one!”) called and offered him a spare room in Mexico City, knowing his wishes to become a musician. His

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leaps up animated: “Tell the Rs! Tell the Rs!” Mabe doesn’t pay him any attention, but looks over and howls when he claims he wanted the drums on the record to sound like Limp Bizkit.

The subject changes back to source: “If you ask me,” he smiles, “Mexico City is the New York City of Latin America.”

“I fell in love with the energy in this city,” Mabe agrees.

“When I first got there, I would just go to the internet and ask people about stuff. And Julian Bonecchi who I met in the residency was just like, ‘You have to meet Camille and Gibrana’, now of Amor Muere.

“I went to play in this radio session organised by a punk station called Radio Cabra – goat radio – and then [a band called] Tajak released my first record on their label Hole Records, which is how Rich from Tin Angel found my music.”

“When we’d just started Titanic we were touring on Mabe’s second album,” chimes in Héctor, “sat in really heavy traffic with Rich. And we were like, ‘We have these demos, do you want to listen to them?’ He put them on in the van with us and then didn’t say a word for hours, it was pretty weird. I thought he didn’t like it. When we arrived at the venue, three hours had gone with him saying nothing. Then out of nowhere he was like, ‘We should record this.’ I was like, ‘The fuck is wrong with you!?’”

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debut album with Mabe as Titanic, titled Vidrio, is composed to compass her voice around the chaotic urban soundscapes of Mexico City – a hybrid jazz record inspired in equal unlikely parts by David Cronenberg’s 1983 sci-fi film Videodrome and Derek Jarman’s cottage off the coast of Dungeness.

He’s explicitly delighted to have Mabe speak for the project. “I feel like talent doesn’t always get the merit it should,” he explains, riffing against a James Baldwin quote about its insignificance. “Being talented and being creative are both amazing things. But it seems to me people are over-reliant on the creative. It can be pretty cool, you know, but I’m in a campaign of defending talent. A good singer can save a bad song. And the talent often has more mystique than the creative.” He’s quick to clarify that Mabe has both talent and creativity.

“We wanted to get the spelling in a precise way to sing the mood,” he says. “We wanted the vocals to feel a little bit naïve and prepared. You have to speak Spanish to hear it, but we found the proper pronunciation of all these words, and then cut the last syllable. Mabe has an amazing accent. She has a thing with the Rs. You know when kids don’t know how to say the R, they say ‘owrrr’ or something.” It sounds almost wolflike. “She didn’t develop that, and she’s always afraid to say the Rs, but I’m like a hooligan!” He lets out the fondest laugh, and

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S THE THREE step out on stage for their first night at

Café Oto, Dalston becomes Mexico City. The humdrum of the outside drinkers, the whir of a coffee machine, the books getting knocked off the shelf, the short spectator sitting on the piano fallboard, the glass windows reflecting the lampshade onto delivery drivers queuing outside the chicken shop. The rhythms of the city – here and there – can change at any moment. On stage, the trio lock eyes, smirking at one another, making these sounds for the first time like this around Mabe’s music. At the end of the set, once the crowd disperses, Ben Howard (yeah that one) rushes up from the audience to interrogate Héctor about his pedals. A week later, on the Garden Stage at End Of The Road, Héctor improvises Reichian guitar, then from staccato uses the instrument as a vocoder, before Mabe turns ‘Creo Que Puedo Hacer Algo’ into shoegaze, voice unbound by a ceiling. The sun follows her wherever she goes, spotlighting the cello with some kind of improvisational transcendence locked in time for the best set of the festival.

Each time she plays, the songs sounds different; she treats her recordings now like they’re entries in a journal. “All of these records, when I look back at them, they’re moments in my life.

The mix, my voice,” she smiles dourly, “I can think it’s all shit, so I just let them be part of my history instead. When I did my first record I learnt so much from Gibrán.” She looks over at the drummer who’s started the line-check for his solo support set of improvised drum loops. “He was my teacher in a way.” It’s a process of sound over subject, and – she repeats – not giving a fuck. “The more relaxed I feel the better outcome I get. I can do something with my naivety,” she beams. “I’m starting to grasp this about myself: I can be very naïve a lot of the time. I want to learn so much about so many things. I want to build deep into my instrument and my voice, but I believe that I can do stuff without understanding it.”

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A. Savage A trip to Paris to meet the Parquet Courts singer in self-imposed exile, by Katie Beswick.

Photography by Mathieu Zazzo

By the Rue Oberkampf in Paris there’s a café that’s like a simulacrum of a Parisian café, even though it’s the real thing – the low hum of sophisticated conversation, alcohol served alongside neatly folded omelettes, lampshades hung everywhere at different levels, bringing the height of the vast ceiling down so that it encloses us, sat in a banquette by the door, in something like privacy. This is late capitalism, I think, as Andrew Savage, of Parquet Courts, here to discuss his latest solo release, orders a second beer. In these end times, nothing feels like the real thing – authenticity always turns out to be an illusion, even though the present is a terrifying surprise, with its perpetual wars, the suffocating heat of the air, and everything burning.

“A lot of the world is on fire,” Savage says. He’s talking both literally (the world is, after all, burning – perpetual wildfires on almost every continent and record-breaking temperatures exposing our local and global infrastructures as woefully inadequate in terms of their ability to deal with what’s coming) and also figuratively. The burning of the world is an economic phenomenon too, with overheated property markets and soaring cost of living crises, which are partly responsible for Savage’s decision to relocate from New York to Paris, which he has recently done.

“In 2009, Brooklyn had all of these amazing places for artists to be. All these amazing D.I.Y. venues where artists can just go looking for places to go and hang out with each other. You know, drink cheap, see bands cheap. And you could in theory go to, like, eight different places in one night in one neighbourhood if you wanted to. And that just doesn’t exist anymore. And it’s getting much more difficult to be a person who’s bohemian in a city. Because, I don’t know, it’s just completely at odds with late capitalism, you know?”

I do know.

This inhospitable world forms the thematic landscape of Savage’s latest project, Several Songs About Fire, a follow-up to 2017’s Thawing Dawn, marking his New York departure. This album, the press release tells us, might be played ‘in a small club that is slowly burning.’ I listened to it for a third time on the Eurostar out to our meeting, imagining, as I do, that I’m in that small club as flames lap all around. The experience is disconcerting, arousing a sense of laconic calm amid rising panic.

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On my favourite track, ‘Riding Cobbles’, Savage duets with drummer Dylan Hadley on a rhythmic, whimsical composition that feels almost satirical in the context of flaming end times. But the album is infused with a sense of childish wonder too; a collection of maudlin nursery rhymes (and I mean that in a good way), which hint at the possibilities still available in a ruined future. I wonder how far this jarring composition reflects Savage’s own apprehension about life in New York, that paradox of excitement and trepidation about leaving the familiar for something new; the optimistic naivety that has to accompany

“It’s getting much more difficult to be a person who’s bohemian in a city. Because it’s just completely at odds with late capitalism” that. Was a sense of shifting place, and the anticipation of a new life, channelled deliberately in the music?

“Sure,” he says, dipping a flatbread in some hummus he’s just ordered. Most of the tracks, he tells me, were written in New York, but always in the knowledge he was leaving. “I think every artist has a relationship to the place that they live or call home.

So I think the artist is always sort of grappling with their identity and location, home, geography. And that’s a really key part of the way we identify ourselves. So it makes sense that, you know… I mentioned [ James] Joyce in one of the songs, ‘Elvis in the Army’.

It sounds a bit lofty, I guess, but I do think it is interesting that he, you know, for most of his professional career as a writer, did not live in Dublin, yet focused on writing about it. And there’s always … I’ll always be from America. I don’t call [Paris] home because at the age that I’ve moved here it doesn’t feel right to call it that. New York has got me still – home. That’s where I came to be who I am.”

So why leave? I ask – the album doesn’t necessarily give the impression that was a straightforward decision. And we’re back to the end times discussion. “I felt like I had to go somewhere. I’m 36 and quite scared of what’s happening in the US. You might think, ‘Well, then why did you go to France?’ Because they have very similar problems here, actually. But I had to go somewhere. I knew that I had to leave. I had to go somewhere.

So I’m not sure if I’m going to stay here. I think that is important to note. I don’t know where I’m going to go, but I had to go somewhere, and I started here because I’ve got the most friends here as anywhere in Europe. And being in the EU seems important to me – and the record label [Rough Trade] is here. I want to be somewhere where I have access to health care. That’s important to me. And I would like to be somewhere that isn’t as violent, where violence isn’t so much a part of your daily consciousness like it is in the States. But it’s. I don’t know. There’s a certain amount of hopelessness I think, that’s starting to permeate the American identity. And I was feeling that. And I didn’t like it.

And so, you know, I’m still figuring out the exit strategy.”

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I

ORDER ONE of those perfect folded Parisian omelettes as Savage speaks. What’s fascinating in talking to him about his work is the contrast between his slightly awkward personal demeanour and the confidence of the delivery and craft of his music. On Several Songs About Fire, Savage doesn’t only do the atmospheric work of conveying an internal and external world in disarray; another remarkable feature of the album is the lyrical wit and wordplay. At a technical level, the words deliver a conviction that suggests an artist fully realised in his chosen medium – Savage sees this ability with words as a cornerstone of his artistry and part of the musical legacy from which his practice has evolved.

“I guess the first thing I was attracted to [as a consumer of music] was probably just like a clever turn of phrase,” he says.

“And I mean, obviously, like all the British Invasion bands were pretty good at that. The Kinks were really good at it; The Beatles certainly were. And then I think, you know, I got into punk because it felt righteous and it had a message and it had something to say.

And that’s an important part of being a lyricist, is that you feel strongly about something and have something to say. I think. So, I guess I kind of learned that lesson. And then, you know it’s a lot of the usual suspects for [influential] lyricists, I think. Patti Smith.

Television. Dylan. But also, I’m originally from Texas and I grew up hearing a lot of country music, which is a very narrative type of music and is kind of based in storytelling. And so. Yeah, there would be people like Van Zandt and Neil Harris.”

It’s his lyrics, he tells me, that resonate most with fans, who understand that he has something to say and a specific way of saying it. That is not just in the specifics of the words, but in the way the words translate off the page. As he warms into discussing the process, Savage reflects on the ways he has developed as a singer, now able to use technique to control the delivery of his words.

“I mean, I guess with every record I challenge myself in some way,” he says. “You know, I try to play with range a bit.

I like the line between singing and speaking. There’s a line between singing and speaking and playing with that is interesting, I think. Some people we describe as having a melodic voice or a singing voice. No one would describe me like that. I know this, I kind of have a monotonous voice, I know, but not when I sing. When I sing, I can do a lot of different things. I like that line between talking and singing because it involves subtlety, which is important. There are some people who can just get out there and belt, and I can do a bit of that. I can project my voice quite loud, but that’s what I like – I like playing with dynamics, as far as being a singer goes. And I guess with the work that I make under my own name, A. Savage, it’s maybe bit different. Maybe that’s one of the ways it’s a bit different. I just use my voice in a different way. I don’t know how familiar you are with Parquet Courts, but it seems to me like it’s pretty different.”

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HE TOURING OF Several Songs About Fire will start in October, when Savage returns to the States for a set in Oakland. The pleasure of this new stage in his life and career, despite the global context, is partly driven by a sense of the ways he can scale the work to different audiences – stripping it back to just his voice and an acoustic guitar or performing with an eight-piece band. A great painter, he tells me, should

be able to distil her work to a simple line drawing, and in the same vein, songwriters should write songs that can be pared back to the voice alone.

And he does think of himself as a great songwriter.

“I’m not an egomaniac,” he explains. “And you know, there’s a lot that I’m not good at. But one of the things I am very good at is writing songs. Of people my age, my generation, I think I’m frankly one of the better ones. And that’s what I want people to know, really. You know, I’m proud of what I do and I’m proud of the work that I do.

“I’m starting to realise my age at this point,” he says. “I see critical music websites like yours, and in magazines and stuff, I see now, okay, I’m on the older end of people they’re covering. And then I see the younger people – and this makes me sound old and I already hate that I’m saying it – but it’s like, okay, you know, I get why this is interesting because this is

young, this person’s young. It’s a fresh perspective and they’re uninhibited because they’re young and there’s a sort of brashness with youth and a sort of flippancy, I guess, that attracts people. And I guess people are attracted to the sex appeal of younger people as well. But when people stay involved, artists who spend their whole life dedicated to their art only get more interesting. Everybody loves the first two or three Leonard Cohen records. He was so young, but he had this unique new voice. But the stuff that he did right up until the very end is very interesting. And his voice becomes more articulate in it.

Same thing with someone like Patti Smith. Her lyrics and her poetry are still very, very good, if not better now. People get more interesting when they get older, as long as they maintain that hunger, that thirst, a desire to be an artist, you know if they don’t relinquish that – that’s when you get boring, when you relinquish that.”

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Reviews Albums

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Albums

L’Rain — I Killed Your Dog (mexican summer) I Killed Your Dog, the new record from L’Rain, is an album of knotted questions. “Ends of days, are you ready?”; “How can we carry on smiling?”; “Am I wasted? Hated?”; “Will I lose feeling?”; “How do you trust yourself when it feels like everything you do is bad for you?”; “What’s that song?”; “Will you forget me along the way?”

Each day there are new questions to leave us unstuck. Brooklyn artist Taja Cheek, the creative force behind L’Rain, makes music that offers a place to ground yourself. But first, she convinces you that the ground isn’t there, and lets you fall into those questions. Her last album, Fatigue, began with one of them: “What have you done to change?”, on opening track ‘Fly, Die’. She maps a musical collage around it, full of big emotions, fragmented memories and blown-out textures. Lo-fi phone recordings collide with stunning studio performances. Pieces of her life are laid bare next to cryptic lyricism and amorphous feelings. Confusion turns to comfort. The result is heavy and healing.

Fatigue is a record that deepens the more time you spend with it, a quality shared by this ambitious return.

In the early 2010s, Cheek explored loops and samples within the flourishing Brooklyn DIY community, where she played noise music and hosted shows in her basement with the likes of Dreamcrusher and TV On The Radio’s Kyp Malone. She explored fresh and free ideas that felt worlds away from the classical cello and piano music she had studied. It also gave her a passion for art curation, though she prefers the term ‘art worker’ to describe that career path, given how logistical much of the work actually is.

She became an associate curator at contemporary art institution MoMA PS1, where pouring over logistics and details

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was essential. But just as important was an understanding of the community around her. What were people going through at the moment? What would surprise and delight? Who could be called on to help at the last minute? And in her recorded work, we’ve seen how those skills have been essential to her own artistry: on Fatigue, a 20-strong cast of musicians give their voice to a cohesive whole; on I Killed Your Dog, a close-knit group of collaborators give the record a sense of scope even at its barest.

These skills led to a recent position as the first Artist Curator at BRIC Celebrate Brooklyn!, a festival she holds close to her heart. As a kid, she grew up framing whole summers around the free events. Without a fake ID, they were the only way she could access culture.

Though she didn’t get into a David Byrne show in 2009, dancing outside with a friend became a core memory.

And Cheek has what she describes as a horrible memory. It’s why she records so many moments of her life. It’s given her the opportunity to turn pieces of her life into stunning meditations on grief, like on Fatigue’s ‘Find It’, or as a way to bring levity and a moment of reprieve, like on ‘Love Her’ where she’s simply goofing around with some mates. What makes them so powerful on record is how she removes the context without removing the core emotion. You don’t have to know that ‘Find It’ was recorded as a service commemorating a recently deceased loved one to feel its weight. You don’t have to know what her friends are joking about to feel joy on ‘Love Her’ (from the same album).

I Killed Your Dog doesn’t feature as many scraps of memory repurposed into song, but it does feature that same ghostly removal of context. When she sings about the end of the world on ‘Our Funeral’, it’s not clear if she’s writing literally or about the death of a relationship. The dread is the same.

Still, there are stunning interludes this time too. Some act as palate cleansers, like ‘Monsoon of Regret’, which echoes Arthur Russell with its intimate practice room vibe. Others, like ‘Sometimes’, are loose experiments discon-

nected from time and place. The only one of these scraps that doesn’t satisfy is the knowingly infantile ‘I Hate My Friends’, but even Blonde has that one about Facebook, so it can be forgiven.

While the record remains as unstable and surprising as anything else she has made, it does so while playing with more fully-formed song structures, and nods to classic rock and psychedelia. “I like to try things out and see where it gets me, and I don’t always know.” Cheek said in an interview with the podcast Switched On Pop on the release of Fatigue. “I revere songwriters, and I think it’s such an important, beautiful craft, and I don’t know if I’m making songs yet. I’m just putting things together and seeing what happens at the other end of it. They’re kind of like songs but they’re kinda not. I want the freedom to do what I wanna do.”

She writes fully fleshed-out songs on I Killed Your Dog, without sacrificing her artistic freedom from genre or expectation. There are twists on deep house, blues, and the kind of sunshine pop that the 5th Dimension might have conjured had there been a 6th. To explore these various strands, she returns to longtime collaborators Andrew Lappin and Ben Chapoteau-Katz. The three have formed a tight creative bond, and their interplay leads to thrilling moments of raw expression that colour the record’s transience in a new light.

On ‘Knead Bee’, the bass, keys and drums lock into an off-kilter groove that floats on gently until L’Rain gives the command: ‘go’. The song breaks into cathartic movement. All players rush forward together. You can see L’Rain at the centre, emerging as band leader.

Earlier in the song, she sings “Tell me who I am, thank you ma’am”. That ‘go’ is a clear moment of certainty.

Songs like this earn their power because of what is carefully curated around them. Before, the track ‘Uncertainty Principle’ picks at the constant ‘maybe’s of the universe, which are beautifully messy, optimistic or terrifying depending on how you view them. L’Rain appears to the listener as some sort of nihilistic optimist, although the person her words are

Albums addressing may not feel the same: “It’s a new day and I will believe in something”; “Maybe someday we will all believe in something”; “You’re convinced that in the dark there will be nothing”; “But for me, a little nothing’s got some something…”

Here, you’re still reeling from the title track several songs ago, where the queasy chorus modulates between major and minor, samples warp from laughing to crying, and lyrics can’t decide whether they’re happy or sad about murdering a family pet. It’s the uncertainty principle in narrative form. The protagonist of ‘I Killed Your Dog’ is unstable and everchanging, but change on its own doesn’t seem to bring solace. It’s a gorgeous, churning character study that lets you provide the questions this time.

Immediately following is ‘5 to 8 Hours A Day (WWwaG)’, the album’s brightest offering. Dreamy layered vocals and gentle guitar arpeggios lead into a meditative spoken word passage, which spills out with the same kind of openness as the best Cassandra Jenkins songs.

L’Rain’s take is smudged and playfully cryptic, offering only brief clarity on the line “You didn’t think this would come out of me”, as if talking to the audience and their expectations.

Her take on indie rock is just as destabilising on ‘Pet Rock’, where the grisly urban myth of a dead girl propped up by her murderers on the subway is somehow turned into an elongated earworm chorus. The plucky energy of her guitars, which sit somewhere between Stereolab and The Strokes, contradicts the apathy of the song. That central messiness makes it work.

By the end of the record, L’Rain finds more peace, even when still questioning herself and the world. ‘Clumsy’ is a tender guitar ballad to the self, where she fully allows herself to sink into the depth of those feelings. We hear a drowsy sample of what could be someone being comforted while crying, or a moment of intimacy saved on her phone. You think of moments like that from your own life.

We end on ‘New Year’s UnResolution’, a new beginning that welcomes more

unravelling to come. On it, she finds new love and connection as watery and crystalline synths wash over the mix. Yet L’Rain also can’t help but wonder when the other shoe will drop, and she’ll be alone again.

Still, on I Killed Your Dog, there’s happiness, colour and life to distract us in the meantime. 8/10 Skye Butchard

Mitski — The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We (dead oceans) There was a whiff of contractual obligation about Mitski’s last album, Laurel Hell.

The first music the Japanese-American artist delivered after she’d announced her hiatus from the music industry in 2022, it was a muddled mix of oversaturated ’80s pop and electronic bangers.

Its follow-up comes only 18 months later but it feels like the work of a rejuvenated artist. Sonically diverse, its 11 tracks are united under the banner of love. A fiercely intelligent lyricist, it’s little surprise this theme offers more than conventional romance. ‘Heaven’, with its countrified orchestration, creates a vivid scene as she sips “on the rest of the coffee left by you.” ‘Star’, which opens with layers of cosmic synths, offers the faux revelation, “I’d always been alone until you taught me to live for somebody.”

Yet it’s on lead track ‘Bug Like an Angel’ that she reveals her sage-like bite.

An ode to the lonely solace of when, “a drink feels like family,” its minimal guitar and emotionless delivery is interrupted by a redemptive 17-strong choir on the final word.

The use of emotional and sonic binary is repeated on the Americana of ‘I’m Your Man’. Its seemingly slavish love (“If you leave me, I shall die”) is turned on its head with the realisation she’s addressing her internalised patriarch, who treats her like a dog. Baying hounds

track him down before an almost chilling silence descends.

In stepping back from her commercial flirtation, during which she supported Harry Styles, the album embraces a quieter ambition that makes inhospitality sound strangely inviting. 8/10 Susan Darlington

Animal Collective — Isn’t It Now? (domino) Written in the same time period as previous record Time Skiffs; Isn’t It Now? furthers the notion that Animal Collective are a peerlessly playful band in a purple patch of melodic generosity.

Unlike Time Skiffs this new set was recorded live, a process which bears fruit on concert staple and album centrepiece ‘Defeat’, a track that has gently evolved through five years of road testing. Now sprawling beyond the 20-minute mark, it drones woozily, ascending and descending either side of the middle section’s hopeful chants. Lyrical themes of nostalgia, nature and perseverance are a consistent throughline in the band’s two-decade career and this humanist pulse is the steady beat upon which Animal Collective stage the different acts of ‘Defeat’s engrossing musical narrative.

Elsewhere ‘Soul Capturer’ is a characteristically rich opener that drips like thick treacle. Its follow-up ‘Genie’s Open’ begins as a glimmering slice of Animal Collective classicism, before the latter third canters into a floral ode to Neu!’s ‘Hallogallo’, with Avey Tare’s gurgling calls weaving in and out of the motorik beat. His voice is so unmistakably part of the Animal Collective sound: its excited bubbles and lower register giddy croons are a perfect foil to Panda Bear’s po-faced chorister.

As on Time Skiffs, sample and electronics manipulator Geologist’s interest in Renaissance music continues to

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Albums show influence. Here it dictates the three largely acapella harmonies of final track ‘King’s Walk’. Decadent in its polyphony, the closer is a fitting curtain call to this fine chapter in the Baltimore four-piece’s evolving story. 8/10 Theo Gorst

KMRU — Dissolution Grip (ofnot) Dissolution Grip exists outside of time and place, while deep inside them both.

As might be expected given his back catalogue, each of the sounds on KMRU’s latest project started as a locationspecific field recording, but were ultimately sculpted and retooled in the image of an orchestra, giving up their origins in the pursuit of beauty.

And while their birthplace might have been obscured, the synth-like tracks fizz with a vibrancy that can only have been born in the field. Take digital bonus track ‘Along A Wall’, which manipulates the sound of wind shaking his family’s Kenyan compound to its foundations.

There are no longer any obvious or easily decoded markers that reveal its roots, but something of the moment’s vitality lives on in the track’s blanketing surges and gentler recesses.

The three pieces mesmerisingly unfold at a glacial pace, walking a delicate line between drone and symphony and occasionally recalling Pauline Oliveros and her techniques. Emulating her pioneering use of tape loops with new technologies, KMRU finds a way to honour the memory of a sound while stripping it and refashioning it completely.

The resultant album is both comforting and intriguing, with each track standing alone as an accomplished composition, absorbing and releasing its audience, but sitting within a whole that similarly rushes and recedes. It demands

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a patience and curiosity from the listener, but one that’s well rewarded over its brief runtime. It is perfectly titled: Dissolution Grip’s sense of self holds fast in the face of disintegration. 8/10 Jake Crossland

Laurel Halo — Atlas (awe) Laurel Halo is a Michigan-born, now LA-based composer, producer and DJ whose latest record Atlas is perhaps one of the most highbrow offerings to today’s new release climate. Self-described as a ‘subconscious’ journey through time and space, Atlas belongs nowhere else than in some of East London’s finest juice bars, decorated only by a plethora of exotic, yet flourishing houseplants. I can imagine the highly mineralised hipsters who dwell in said settings listen to nothing other than NTS, which stands Laurel Halo in good stead for this record as she has, you’ve guessed it, a bi-weekly show there entitled ‘Awe’, which she describes as “something you feel when confronted with forces beyond your control: nature, the cosmos, chaos, human error, hallucinations.” Are you beginning to get the picture?

I hope you, reader, understand that my need to prey on a few clichés comes from a place of sincere jealousy, emanating from the fact that here is a tremendously academic individual who has seamlessly created such a totally captivating piece of work. This is an exceptional example of translating theory into practice; Atlas is none other than a pragmatic achievement. Each track blends into the next, held together by fuzzily sustained textures impossible to fully grasp. The record is otherworldly, but littered with subtle piano parts which bring you home just at the vital points, forcing you to feel grounded once again.

Atlas combines numerous musical vernaculars to create an unending,

modern minimalist triumph which stands tall alongside groundbreaking titles such as Brian Eno’s Music for Airports and Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians. A wonderfully refreshing and worthwhile listen. 8/10 Leo Lawton

Armand Hammer — We Buy Diabetic Test Strips (fat possum) With the possible – and sort of incomparable, due to the different commercial scales at which both artists work – exception of Kendrick Lamar, it’s hard to think of a contemporary rapper who commands the same level of respect from fans, critics and fellow artists as Billy Woods.

His concentrated flow and meticulous, painterly storytelling make him an MC like no other, able to straddle genres and push his many collaborators in hitherto unknown directions with deftness and grace. The camera-shy NYC artist has already helmed one of 2023’s best hip hop records – Maps, teaming with Kenny Segal – and now, once again working with Elucid as part of Armand Hammer, he’s a key presence on another.

In many ways, We Buy Diabetic Test Strips is an archetypical Billy Woods record, over which Woods looms large, but never dominates or stifles his co-conspirators. It’s a shared experience, not an ego trip. To start with, it is of course an Armand Hammer record, not a Billy Woods solo work, and Elucid’s restless, hungry delivery is again his perfect foil; JPEGMAFIA’s shapeshifting production drives several of the record’s most thrilling moments, from the seething tension of opener ‘Landlines’ to the sleepwalking groove of ‘The Key Is Under The Mat’. Other alt-rap luminaries make welcome appearances here, from unmistakable wordsmith Moor Mother to Run The Jewels’ El-P, Pink Siifu, Junglepussy

Albums and more. The textures are caustic and sticky, classic boom-bap dragged through the smoke of industry and rush-hour traffic, yet there are rays of light here, relief accessible via a witty line or smart production lift (see ‘Woke Up And Asked Siri How I’m Gonna Die’ for examples of each, particularly the reverb-drenched melody that pirouettes around JPEGMAFIA’s crunchy beat throughout).

It’s another essential release from Billy Woods’ extended universe – and perhaps the most cohesive, adventurous Armand Hammer album yet. Long may this incredible run of form continue. 9/10 Luke Cartledge

Yeule — Softscars (ninja tune) Are you bored of AI art yet? More specifically, are you bored of art inspired by AI? You’d be forgiven. So much of it is hackneyed slop without any bite. It’s late-stage Black Mirror tackling late-stage capitalism, Grimes songs called things like ‘I Wanna Be Software’, and video games called things like Cyberpunk 2077.

Yeule is not that. The Singaporianborn alt-pop artist uses their sad robot persona to underline the overstimulation and isolation of being terminally online.

Yes, there are obvious points being made (and even a song called ‘Software Update’), but there’s an honesty and heft that sets them apart from many working in this thematic and aesthetic zone.

It’s fitting then that Softscars, their third album, leans more into emo and shoegaze, genres which revel in pushing obvious and embarrassing emotions to the surface. “If only I could be real enough to love”, they sing on ‘Ghosts’, taking the vulnerability past levels of discomfort, right into eerie intimacy. Though we heard fragments of this sound on Glitch Princess highlight ‘Don’t Be So Hard On

Your Own Beauty’, it’s developed with confidence and power here.

Put simply, Softscars is an undeniably sharp collection of songs. That it does this while mining the depths of a well-worn, often eye-roll-inducing theme is all the more impressive. It’s full of surprising turns and textural delicacy.

You’ll find yourself caught off-guard, obvious lyrics turned into poignant home truths: “You’re never alone / I’m inside your phone”. 8/10 Skye Butchard

Apostille — Prisoners (night school) Michael Kasparis continues his quest to be a one-person music factory. Beyond his work in delivering ultra-intense punk vibes with Anxiety and The Lowest Form, he’s also the driving force behind his DIY label Night School. Since 2015, he’s been tinkering with manic electronica under the guise of his alter ego Apostille, joining the ranks of those who’ve dared to tread the unlikely tightrope connecting hardcore with club-friendly electro-pop. It’s a trend that in its mid-2000s heyday witnessed Daryl Palumbo’s leap from the scathing screamo of Glassjaw to the dance-floor-friendly emo-pop of Head Automatica, and Wesly Eisold’s evolution from American Nightmare to Cold Cave; yet with Prisoners, Kasparis achieves a vibrancy that outshines his predecessors.

Building on the foundation laid by 2018’s Choose Life, this latest record fully embraces ’80s synth-pop influences. The result is a collection of songs that expertly captures the essence of soulful lyrics, classic pop melodies and a passionate lead singer fused with dehumanised beats.

It’s a blueprint reminiscent of Soft Cell, Silicon Teens and the early bands under the Mute Records banner. What sets Prisoners apart, however, is its production. Despite the constant infusion of

chaotic breakbeats and gnarled electronic squeals, the album somehow manages to sound both intimate and genuinely emotional. 8/10 Dominic Haley

GÉNN — Unum (liminal collective) It’s hard to believe that this is Brighton-based GÉNN’s debut fulllength album, with the four-piece being veritable up-and-comers since their Liminal EP found unlikely success merging mackerel heads with neopsychedelic rock. It hit the sweet spot of pandemic-era post-punk, where its soaring theatricality offset the devout seriousness of the times.

In many ways, Unum is a victim of the band’s talent. A glimpse of that same Liminal brilliance courses through it, but it’s lost a little of the gleeful light-headedness of creation without expectation.

The Maltese triptych of Leona Farrugia, Janelle Borg and Leanne Zammit are joined by Sofia Rosa Cooper, all of whom have their moments of individual virtuosity across the album. Farrugia’s vocal fires with theatricality, channelling the constrained power of Courtney Love on ‘Heloise’, while Borg’s guitar soars into spaces undreamt of in ‘Apparition No 7’.

The rhythm section is delightfully jazzinflected, pleading the listener to dance to the quotidian tales they tell.

When all parts of GÉNN mesh together, it’s electric. ‘La Saut du Pigeon’ exemplifies where their strengths could lie, with surreal murmurs repeating nothing but the track’s phantastic title over hypnotic drive-time psychedelia, like a commercial remake of La Planète Sauvage. Similarly impressive is ‘The Merchant Of ’, on which the band soar together as a darkly commanding collective. When it doesn’t take itself too seriously, it’s mesmerising, but on

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Albums its more didactic numbers it lacks cohesion. Now their talent’s an open secret, and the pressure of the debut’s subsided, the band’s next steps will be the exciting ones. 6/10 Danny Canter

Sufjan Stevens — Javelin (asthmatic kitty) Any attempt to determine what an album is ‘about’ risks overlooking a skilled songwriter’s ability to fuse fact and fiction and obfuscate the origins of their inspiration. This is certainly the case for Sufjan Stevens, who has often preferred to maintain a safe distance from the stereotypical singer-songwriter’s transparent first-person confessionals.

Although the lyrics of Javelin hardly read like naked diary entries, it’s difficult to overlook the undisguised references to a disintegrating relationship in many of the uniformly powerful songs that populate Stevens’ first album in full singer-songwriter mode in eight years (accompanied by a 48-page booklet of art and essays).

Glimpses of hopeful beginnings and spiritual questing (notably on the positively hymnal ‘Everything That Rises’) crop up, alongside a general feeling of taking stock. There is also a cover of Neil Young’s ‘There’s a World’ that transforms the original’s portentous arrangement into a weightless glide full of bright and unadorned beauty. However, there is a sharp twang of lived reality in the weary and wounded manner in which Stevens sighs, “I was the man still in love with you / When I already knew it was done” on first single ‘So You Are Tired’ (a heartbreakingly lived-in lament for the left behind, mapping the acceptance stage of the end of a relationship with a grace that makes most attempts to chart a breakup in song seem hopelessly banal and clunky). The bitter recriminations and,

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ultimately, some semblance of uneasy peace (“Our romantic second chance is dead / I buried it with the hatchet / Quit your antics”) that sweep through the stunning eight-minute centrepiece ‘Shit Talk’ (a refreshingly blunt-speaking title for a hugely ambitious, triumphant miniepic), meanwhile, feel startlingly intimate and undisguised.

‘Will Anybody Ever Love Me?’ marks a stellar return to the rousing choral singalongs of 2005’s Illinois, but the mood has turned from a communal celebration to bruised self-reflection: despite the massed voices pushing the tune to ever more ecstatic heights, this is essentially the sound of the singer gazing into the darkness, alone and in need. On the stunning title track, the protagonist imagines what might have occurred as the consequence of a sudden – and unintended – destructive act: little more than Stevens’ fingerpicked guitar and featherweight voice, the simultaneously delicate and resilient song (which nods towards the deceptive simplicity of prime Simon & Garfunkel) manages to sound like a timeless standard while also feeling deeply personal.

Javelin is far more compelling and complex than a standard-issue my-baby-left-me dispatch of minor-key woe. Imagine the conflicting emotions that ricochet all across the emotional spectrum (not to mention the skillfully applied blend of plain-speaking confessionals and poetically obscured introspection) of Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks. Mix with the acrobatically versatile arrangements of peak-era Brian Wilson constructing opulent homespun symphonies in the solitude of his bedroom. Add a huge dollop of stirringly pretty if not downright heavenly melodies (without the desperate-to-please vacuousness that usually accompanies unashamedly forthright campaigns of ear-pleasing: these are without fail tunes of real substance and bite), and you’re not far off the bruised beauty and exquisite sadness of Javelin.

The record Javelin feels most closely related to is one of Stevens’ own, Carrie and Lowell. That 2015 album

distilled impossibly painful subject material (bereavement and the memories of an unconventional upbringing that grief had brought back to the surface) into a sparse masterpiece. On Carrie and Lowell, the songs were often directed at an elusive parent who had to leave before questions had been answered. Many songs on Javelin also find the protagonist left alone, reflecting on the past, taking stock and wondering – worrying?

– about the future.

It’s perhaps fitting that Stevens has realised songs this brazenly personal largely on his own: Javelin evidences his Prince-like ability to write, arrange, play, produce and record tracks that resemble the opulent outpourings of a tightly drilled studio crew almost entirely solo, with just a few guests. The songs here often start from a point of quiet contemplation, with just Stevens’ piano or softly plucked acoustic guitar and hushed vocals, before additional elements – including percussion, subtle electronics, wind instruments and multilayered backing vocals – enter the frame to craft elaborate orchestrations. Especially on initial listens, there are times on Javelin when the application of arrangement touches can feel like a superfluous distraction from the unadorned beauty of the songs, almost as if Stevens doesn’t always completely believe in the peerless potency of the indestructible melodies he’s crafted for Javelin. That said, the extra touches (especially the massed backing vocals) can also elevate the melodies to an everbrighter sparkle: the simple xylophone melody on the lullaby-esque ‘My Red Little Fox’ accentuates the song’s stately melody to such levels of indelible perfection that it’s easy to imagine the melody lying in hibernation underground for eons, just waiting for the right songwriter to come and excavate it.

Javelin provides irrefutable proof that for all of his wild stylistic leaps and gifts for elaborate grand gestures, Sufjan Stevens’ most remarkable talents lay in emotionally resonant songwriting that really does not require many extra trimmings or gimmicks to move the listener to the core. 9/10 Janne Oinonen

Albums

Loraine James — Gentle Confrontation (hyperdub) Loraine James lets us take a deep, nostalgic dive into the innocence of her past with her third album Gentle Confrontation.

A work of high sentiment and originality, Loraine carries her listeners into a world inspired by the avant-garde varieties of rock, R&B, rap and emo electronic; it’s kind of like music from an earlier age, when artists were free to roam around their playground mixing these styles of genres together with the outcome being shockingly refreshing to ears unspoilt by streaming saturation. The opening title track centres us with haunting, classically eerie elements whilst pulling towards a vortex of vulnerability, building on our emotions through atypical rhythmic jungle and glitchy broken beats moulded by repetitive vocals; from there, we’re strapped in for a diverse 16-track collection.

The use of Auto-Tune on the vocal parts of some tracks like ‘Let It Go’ adds a tenderness to her work, particularly as emotional, melodic piano sounds blend with contemporary drum pads and synths. Every track is stripped of its ego, allowing you to be in your feelings and away from the real world. 8/10 Jazz Brown

Oneothrix Point Never — Again (warp) I recently stumbled over an online debate about whether Oneothrix Point Never is this generation’s

Brian Eno. I’ll admit I scoffed at first; but the more I think about this chat, the more I find myself agreeing with it. In the last 20 years, few other artists can boast a body of work as influential as Daniel Lopatin. His gravity is similar to Prince, James Murphy and Dr Dre, able to warp the underground and mainstream simultaneously.

Again continues the trajectory of blurring the lines between melodic pop and ambient electronica set by 2020’s Magic. However, while still making a record that is as dense and unstructured as ever, Lopatin has managed to twist in ever more maximal and sweeping directions. It might be his work with The Weeknd and on major film scores bleeding into his day job, but parts of this record tug the heartstrings like a soundtrack of an old-time weepy. Tracks like ‘Locrian Midwest’ and ‘Memories of Music’ shimmer with gorgeous string lines, delivering the kind of emotional punch that an ambient record usually has no right to claim.

You could criticise Again for the way it presents an excess of ideas that challenge its coherence as a seamless listening experience; its shifts in tone render it slightly more challenging to digest than Oneohtrix’s more classic albums. Nevertheless, it stands as an admirably robust addition to a back catalogue with few equals. 7/10 Dominic Haley

Modern Nature — No Fixed Point in Space (bella union) The first two Modern Nature record, 2019’s How to Live and 2021’s Island of Noise, marked a decisive break with the past for Jack Cooper, previously best known for making charming, inventive pop music as one half of Ultimate Painting,

and, before that, melodic indie rock as the frontman of Mazes. Suddenly, the traditional song structures that had defined those two outfits were eschewed in favour of open-ended pieces that often sound improvisational; it is a rabbit hole Cooper appears only too happy to continue heading down, particularly on the evidence of this third album, No Fixed Point in Space.

The title is instructive; he describes his extensive cast of collaborators on the album as “imaginative interpreters” and sure enough, there doesn’t seem to be anything in particular anchoring the songs, allowing him to let his hushed, sparse instrumentals slowly unfurl, making a quiet but determined argument for organic creativity. It is an album that rewards patience; thoughtful and ruminative, calling to mind at times the impressionistic style of songwriting that Mark Hollis of Talk Talk so skilfully embraced in the latter stages of his career.

Cooper is progressing at his own pace; the results are elegant. 7/10 Joe Goggins

CHAI — CHAI (sub pop) Nagoyaformed, Tokyo-based quartet CHAI have amassed an ever-expanding global fanbase off the back of a hat trick of buzzy albums and an impressive live reputation. From the outside, keeping up with their sonic travails is no easy business, with their roots in garage punk, tendrils reaching towards pop rock and various migrations into R&B, disco and hip hop making the categorisation of this band nigh-on impossible. But that’s exactly how they want it, and on this new selftitled record, easy classification is similarly out of reach.

Here, CHAI have produced another nebulous collection of tracks that span soft-rock, lounge jazz and new wave. Partly

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Albums intended as an ode to their native Japan, these songs both celebrate their experiences and detail their socially conscious ethos. Aesthetically, tracks like ‘MATCHA’ and ‘KARAOKE’ are inescapably on-brand, but hidden throughout are more latent themes. CHAI have adopted the term neokawaii to describe a new more liberal and less confining version of the well-documented Japanese cultural movement, equal parts progression and progress; here they combine that idea with an exploration of city pop, a sound first popularised in 1970s Japan and more recently unearthed and contemporised with internet-informed genres like vaporwave.

Their magpie-like genre-splicing and fun-forward approach to music is clear in witty musical intertextualities like ‘NEO KAWAII, K?’, which sounds like Basement Jaxx’s ‘Where’s Your Head At? put through an indie sleaze filter, whilst ‘Driving22’ sounds not unlike CHVRCHES’ ‘Mother We Share’. On the face of it, CHAI are a punk rock band who achieved note and started to broaden their sound – a story not altogether unfamiliar – but here they prove themselves to have more depth than that. This is a band making charismatic music with point and purpose both audibly and thematically, in a way that sounds simultaneously fresh and nostalgic. The band have declared their desire to make “their own genre and update it and evolve it in the future”, and I’d say they’re making assured strides in the right direction. Underestimate this band as bubblegum pop-rock at your peril. 7/10 Tom Critten

Emma Anderson — Pearlies (sonic cathedral) For someone who formed her first band in 1986 and then found success as part of the first wave of shoegaze in the early ’90s, it shouldn’t be a

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surprise that ex-Lush guitarist Emma Anderson’s debut solo outing sounds like it does: programmed drums and vintage keyboards underpinning washes and flourishes of glistening, dense guitar with almost-whispered vocals alternately buried within the mix and floating on top, the effect being a very pleasant, gauzy 30-year timewarp.

Perhaps what’s more surprising is how contemporary these retro stylings sound here, maybe because of Anderson’s decision to record the whole thing straight into her computer with no band, giving her and her producer James Chapman (aka bedroom electronica auteur Maps) complete editorial control. Such frictionless production makes for a pleasingly intimate take on the usually grandiose stylings of dreampop, even if occasionally the results are overly clean and gridded, lacking the spontaneity and energy that human musicians – particularly in terms of percussion – can offer.

When it works, though, as it frequently does, Pearlies is genuinely bewitching, reminiscent of the folkhorror sides of Goldfrapp and Broadcast and full of pretty melodies with foreboding underbellies, like TV theme tunes beamed in from an alternate dimension.

7/10 Sam Walton

Maria Uzor — Soft Cuts (castles in space) Experimentalism should deliver a diamond in the rough. The chocolate and chili of the music world, some things work together when you feel like they shouldn’t. However when bizarre combinations don’t work, they should remain as divided as chalk and cheese.

Maria Uzor’s Soft Cuts attempts to blend electronic, dub, dark ambient and a long list of others, missing the target. Genre-

hopping is paired with demo-level vocals, leading Uzor to become a disembodied voice against random instrumentals.

‘Prophylactics for Pterodactyls’ lacks good structure, becoming a distracting track with electronic birds tweeting incessantly at you. Ironically named ‘Your Approval’ closes the album on a genuinely weird note as the off-kilter track floats off into oblivion. Uzor has drawn upon a wide range of influences including but not limited to UK garage, dubstep and Disney soundtracks, yet there doesn’t seem to be a thread to tie all of these sounds together, the album wandering aimlessly. Soft Cuts contains anything but deep cuts and maybe that wasn’t the purpose behind it. However, the record’s meandering nature prevents any revelations from hitting hard. 5/10 Sophia McDonald

Hinako Omori – Stillness, Softness… (houndstooth) Hinako Omori’s astounding debut album found much of its intrigue in bringing the outsides inwards; through sound therapy and the Japanese practice of shinrin-yoku (“forest-bathing”), even the most passive encounter with A Journey… became an incidental exercise in deep listening. The most menial, background tasks – water running from the tap, the mechanical purr of a laptop – elicited a strange kind of presence when locked into Omori’s ambient meanderings. The same domestic apparitions continue into Stillness, Softness… – Omori’s second album on the Houndstooth label – but this time with a whole new emphasis on the introspective potential of her soundscapes.

With barely a second’s silence in its 40 minutes, her streams of consciousness carry the dizzying semblance of a book written in one sentence. Centring her

Albums voice for the first time, tracks alternate from binaural bleep-bloop instrumental to experimental, even subterranean, pop. By ‘In Limbo’, the two states have become indiscernible. “You close the door and here I am waiting, holding the key,” she sings on ‘Ember’, and it’s unclear whether her lowly theatrical, chiffon vocal will launch into power-pop or blend into the record’s ambient lining.

The Jungian image of shadow selves and human repression repeat throughout; for a record concerned with self-healing, Omori realises it’s a state only possible after sincere self-knowledge.

‘Foundation’ is the record in microcosm, perfectly illustrated by the single artwork adorned with a tricklock found in a Japanese antique store, which would have protected its owner’s most valuable possessions. The possessions Omori wants to interrogate aren’t material (but “my foundation is stable,” she assures herself). Further affirmations atonally unravel in ‘Stalactites’, then consume ‘A Structure’, whispered like an automated therapy tape over bright-light waiting-room arpeggios: “here’s the key to your door.” It makes an opulent metaphor for the sub-ego blindspots she swallowtails into.

Recorded between her bedroom in London and grandmother’s house in Yokohama, Stillness, Softness… is a record filled with familial abstracts, so textured you can touch it. Maximalist but bare – and wholly considered – every gutwrench is left in, smoothed out and stronger for it. 9/10 Tristan Gatward

Aunty Rayzor — Viral Wreckage (hakuna kulala) Aunty Rayzor isn’t your mum’s straight-blade-wielding sister, but actually Nigerian rapper/ singer/producer Bisola Olungbenga, who

went Soundcloud-viral in 2021 with a Covid banger, ‘Kuku Corona’, that threw together afrobeats and grime with nods towards trap and memeable pop-rap. Two years on, Viral Wreckage pretty much picks up where her breakout single left off: across the quick-fire half hour that comprises her debut, Rayzor weaves her ratatat verses tightly around cavernous bass and one-finger synth lines (‘Never’ and ‘Murder’), and brings big auto-tuned vocals to dancehall riddims (‘You Not Worthy of My Love’).

Her palette has clearly expanded since lockdown, though: the two tracks here featuring Congolese multi-instrumentalist Titi Bakorta investigate the borders of highlife, all looping polyrhythms and laid-back groove, offering a welcome change of pace compared to the frenetic chaos elsewhere. Chuck in a couple of bigroom workouts that mine the production of Leftfield and early Daft Punk as well as spatterings of baile funk styling, and the result is an album that feels lithe, addictively buoyant and genuinely global. With all but two tracks clocking in at under 150 seconds, too, this is instant-rewind stuff, making it – perhaps appropriately for a pandemic prodigy – incurably infectious.

8/10 Sam Walton

JOHN — A Life Diagrammatic (brace yourself / pets care) Four albums and a decade in, JOHN continue to prove that two instruments are more than capable of matching the ferocity of a marching band in a wind tunnel. Explosive, relentless, and unforgiving, their new album A Life Diagrammatic captures the frenetic energy of their live performance whilst edging towards a more textured and varied soundscape.

Throughout the album, signature moments of eruption are more thought-

fully deployed than in previous work allowing for a newfound subtlety, depth, and melodic sensitivity. Tracks like ‘Construction Site/Summer_22’ and lead single ‘Trauma Mosaic’ pack a surprising amount of feeling into the powerful propulsive drum beat. Most impressive is when this measured control collapses into abstract sections of brooding and echoed reverb. The faint, scratchy monologue of actor Simon Pegg in ‘Media Res’ lends the album a foreboding and tense narrative arc that sets the tone for the atmospheric world building of later tracks.

‘A Submersible’ and ‘A Whole House’, in particular, embrace the cinematic theatricality prompted by Pegg’s monologue and stretch it to encompass both rhythm and melody. The album is a work of taut restraint and largely cathartic release.

If A Life Diagrammatic’s greatest strength is in its slowly built tension and haunting atmosphere, then its weakness is in not having pushed it to its limit. At times, the release that is expected from such moments is absent. Overall though, any issues are almost always quickly forgotten, particularly when we’re thrown headfirst into the electric thumping rhythm of tracks like ‘Service Stationed’, featuring vocals by Leona Farrugia of the frenzied psychedelic band ĠENN. Following its release, the duo will embark on a run of UK in-stores; the intimate setting of these shows is sure to make for a deafening live experience, well worth the inevitable earplug safety measure. 7/10 Natalia Quiros Edmunds

Grrrl Gang — Spunky! (trapped animal) “I was born in the pit / I gave birth in the pit / I don’t shave my pits / Let me swallow your spit,” howls Grrrl Gang vocalist and guitarist Angeeta Sentana on ‘Spunky!’ the punchy pop-

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Albums punk single from their brutally direct and brilliantly fun second album of the same title. These striking proclamations are bountiful across the Indonesian trio’s latest release, which musically often recalls the electrifying riffs that defined a corner of ’90s culture.

The pace at which the band travels through these lightning-speed songs is dizzying, and yet, they endear you to pay close attention to every detail. From sobering lines borne from the harsh realities of growing up (“All my friends are leaving / I’m on my own”) to the struggles of maintaining an equilibrium in one’s self-confidence as Sentana skips between wanting to be a cool girl to proclaiming “People know I’m a fucking superstar”, her personality shines brightly and it’s difficult to look away.

Even if this ’90s revivalist pop-punk style isn’t entirely for you (and perhaps it wasn’t the first time around) there’s plenty of variety across these snappy ten tracks.

In this regard, the texturally alluring instrumental ‘Tower Song’ is an immediate highlight in terms of how the trio demonstrate their dexterity. Similarly, the woozy palette permeating ‘Mother’s Pray’ effortlessly envelops the listener with its immense breath and unexpected ethereal turn. It asserts Grrrl Gang as a force with great songwriting ability.

The album’s overall sound perfectly encapsulates the mood projected from its title; it’s vital and vibrant and bound to boost your mood. 7/10 Zara Hedderman

A. Savage — Several Songs About Fire (rough trade) It’s been six years since Parquet Courts frontman Andrew Savage shared his debut solo album Thawing Dawn. With that release, the Texan songwriter and musician turned towards a much dustier country-tinged

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style than we’d heard from his main band.

His deadpan delivery was more prominent than before and was a perfect companion to the pretty flourishes of the arrangements and storied songs. It created an intimacy across the record, the solitary image of Savage sitting on his bed for the artwork an apt visual representation.

These qualities have carried over to Several Songs About Fire, which is even more engaging than its predecessor. Savage described his latest work as “a burning building, and these songs are things I’d leave behind to save myself.”

The songs are densely (but deftly) penned, and his unhurried performance draws you closer in regardless of him sharing mundane details of a popcorn dinner or stark revelations about himself: “Everytime I try escaping I lose.” There’s a timeless quality to the instrumentation, with Savage intoning alongside a sweet acoustic guitar melody and soft percussion. When we do get a textured arrangement such as ‘Le Grand Balloon’, which has a suave air emanating from the Americana structure, you can’t help but imagine this featuring in a Tarantino film, and Several Songs About Fire’s greatest tonal aspect resides in Euan Hinshelwood’s sophisticated sax flourishes, primarily on ‘Thanksgiving Prayer’ Several Songs About Fire effectively melds Savage’s Parquet Courts and solo work together, and is a great addition to either side of his artistry. 8/10 Zara Hedderman

Flamingods — Head of Pomegranate (the liquid label) Flamingods’ synth-infused Head of Pomegranate captures the ups of idealistic solitude and downs of messy capitalistic excess. It’s a high energy voyage, the London-based quartet bringing you to the brink of hallucination whilst keeping themselves

grounded. Fuzzy at their edges, the guitars and synths tag team from track to track, both getting their time in the limelight, but it’s all well-paced – the album doesn’t get too carried away on its trippy adventure. Longest track ‘Perfumed Garden’ justifies its seven-and-a-half minute runtime and turns from a whimsical reflection about absence to a meditation on life’s cyclical nature.

The album really opens up when the psychedelia takes a back seat. ‘Born Lucky’ and ‘Tall Glass’ borrow more of a rock sensibility. The wooziness of the other foggily laidback tracks lifts for a couple of minutes; a state of clearmindedness taking over. The tabla drum and pungi woodwind sounds included on ‘Born Lucky’ evoke The Beatles’ Ravi Shankar-inspired fusions; a groovy lead guitar on ‘Tall Glass’ makes the track infectious and once you make it to the bridge, you can feel the various heritages of the band members – they formed in Bahrain – melding together. Borrowing from South Asian, North African, Middle Eastern and British traditions, the rock they’re producing is fun, unpredictable and slick. All these cooks only add to the pot rather than spoiling the broth of eclecticism. 7/10 Sophia McDonald

Vagabon — Sorry I Haven’t Called (nonesuch) For this record, her third under her Vagabon moniker, Lætitia Tamko says that she “didn’t feel like being introspective”, which would mark a pretty pronounced departure from the kind of thoughtful, electronicallyinfused pop rock that she served up on Infinite Worlds and Vagabon. Truthfully, though, it suits her, as do some of the production choices on Sorry I Haven’t Called, for which she’s enlisted former Vampire Weekend man Rostam Batman-

Albums glij to assist her behind the boards.

It was a smart bit of recruitment; he helps Tamko to lean into her electronic impulses more than ever before, resulting in sensual, club-ready cuts like ‘You Know How’, as well as breezy synth-pop earworms like ‘Passing Me By’.

There’s experimentation, too; ‘Autobahn’, a nod to the New Yorker having written the record in Germany, is sparse, updating Imogen Heap’s ‘Hide and Seek’ for the present day, while she sets the thrilling, racing ‘Do Your Worst’ over a breakbeat. Perhaps writing modern pop music isn’t that complicated, after all; Sorry I Haven’t Called certainly makes the case that all the artist needs to do is head into the studio with the intention of enjoying themselves. 8/10 Joe Goggins

Leo Robinson — The Temple (prah) From herds of goats to a cormorant diving for fish, Leo Robinson’s debut album The Temple is firmly ensconced within the natural world he so meticulously details.

Whether literally unveiling himself as a “ten tonne heron” on the sprightly ‘The Cormorant’, the strongest suggestion here of a significant Nick Drake influence, to the chopped wood and mountain visualised in The Wintering, Robinson’s use of such symbolism is vivid. His deep baritone and baroque/folk style, nodding towards the esotericism of Richard Dawson as well as some of the needling guitar work of Drake, is key to the richness of his music, which, at its best, feels old, wise, and a little bit wild.

It is perhaps in-keeping with such sentiments then that The Temple is, in essence, an album about growth. While the first half is concerned with notions of deep concern (‘Pavement’) and developing instability (‘The Wintering’), its last

few tracks tell tales of awe and, finally, acceptance. On the closer, ‘The Spring’, Robinson celebrates his role as part of a functioning network, told, as always, via the natural symbolism he often adopts so well. “I’m not a god, I’m a bug in the sand / On the riverbank, I’m a nettle in the dust,” he croons. As with the seasons, The Temple is inconsistent and unpredictable. It is also frequently rather beautiful. Let’s wait and see what his summer holds. 7/10 Ben Lynch

WaqWaq Kingdom — Hot Pot Totto (phantom limb) It’s a party at the end of the world. Shigeru Ishihara (aka DJ Scotch Egg) and Kiki Hitomi return to deliver a third helping of minyo footwork, a self-penned description that underlines the clashing genres and cultures that make their sound addictive. This time, they’ve set their sights on ecological decay, but you might not realise that at first, given how ecstatic the music is.

Hot Pot Totto is all about energy, confidence and surprise. The duo write songs that pull from dub, dancehall, kuduro, and many many other influences.

There’s a freedom and fluidity to the way they produce. Ideas tumble over each other. Tempos change on the fly. Sounds are jumbled and transformed. What keeps it grounded are Kiki Hitomi’s vocals. She acts as MC and modern spiritual leader, even when buried in goofy effects. ‘The Tower’ is powered by animated verses that become witchy squawks whenever she needs to up the camp.

Ugandan artist Catu Diosis of the Nyege Nyege Tapes roster joins on ‘Buri Buri’. Together, they create one of the most relentless cuts of the year, with its cathartic drum circle and staccato raps.

Elsewhere on ‘Eye Candy Man’, propul-

sive house is given a psychedelic shot to rival a final night in Ibiza. These are joyful sounds, with protest and anger lurking in the background. Given how upfront so much of the music is, the lyrics would benefit from being more cut-throat in their ecological messaging, but there’s no doubt how much thought, passion and optimism went into these urgent party tracks. 7/10 Skye Butchard

Laura Misch — Sample The Sky (one little independent) Laura Misch, a London based mutli-disciplinary artist, is already well-versed in crafting hypnagogic sounds that combine masterly musicianship with nimble composition. Misch has already released an impressive assemblage of early works, showcasing wide ranging proficiencies as a saxophonist, producer, composer and creative director. To some, therefore, it may be hard to believe that Sample The Sky is Misch’s first full-length album. For this debut, Misch expands her workflow, embracing a self-admittedly hard-earned extroversion to tap into her adjacent creative community and invite in a broader range of artistic textures; the result has mixed implications.

On the one hand, here Misch crafts a collection of tracks full of naturalistic beauty, as the interconnected ebb and flow of melodies, electronic beats and sonic inferences collude to deliver a co-opt of noteworthy moments. Opener ‘Hide To Seek’ sets the tone, with meditative saxophone melodies that move with gentle grace, like a soft breeze pushing the branches of a willow tree. The arpeggiating synthesiser of ‘Portals’ gives the impression of the homeostatic rise and fall that self-regulates natural ecosystems, and special mention should be made of Misch’s warm vocal, showcased best on tracks like ‘Widening Circles’.

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Albums Misch herself likens some recordings here as ‘mycelial’ – connected by organic networks – and that one could apply that term critically as well as positively; Sample The Sky does feel only partly speckled with the fruits of an entire hidden underground network of aptitude. It’s a record full of atmosphere and appeal, but there are instances that can feel a little fleeting, unfocused and condensed, leaving some promising ideas inadequately explored. Yet there is inarguable potential and talent here; Laura Misch is someone to keep an eye on. 6/10 Tom Critten

Slow Pulp — Yard (anti) Slow Pulp’s sophomore album Yard follows 2020’s Moveys, a record that saw the band tackle disease diagnosis, the fallout from a serious car accident, as well as the pandemic. With Yard the band free themselves from the aforementioned restrictions and traumas, focusing their energy on what they can do, rather than what they can’t.

What they can do then, is deliver quietly defiant moments of introspection. Written in a country cabin and selfproduced on a farm in rural Wisconsin, Yard reflects the isolated surroundings in which it was created. The songs are deeply intimate, more dynamic and compelling than their previous offerings, acting as moments of enduring self-reflection on an ever-winding road.

Most tracks slip under three minutes, flitting for the most part between lo-fi indie folk and summery soft grunge, brightened up with twinges of americana.

‘Doubt’ and feedback laden ‘Cramps’ act as nostalgic, softly-coloured soundtracks, depicting growing pains that cease to end.

Slow Pulp effortlessly capture the intimacy of emotions and power of intro-

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version, and with an album like Yard, the four-piece are solidifying themselves a legacy alongside greats of this temperament like Soccer Mommy and Beabadobee. 8/10 Jasleen Dhindsa

Occasionally, in freefall, she’ll grab onto something familiar to steady herself – but she truly succeeds when she leans into her creative freedom. 6/10 Jake Crossland

Jorja Smith — Falling or Flying (famm) Jorja Smith is in two minds. On the best moment of her second album Falling or Flying, there’s a sense of bold experimentation; yet there are also points which feel more like a tired return to the safety of her debut.

Those two halves line up fairly accurately with sides A and B, a supposedly intentional choice to reflect the album’s title. Lead single and opener ‘Try Me’ reintroduces Smith while she’s flying, ruminating on change over serpentine rhythms, shotgun samples and shouts.

Highlight ‘Little Things’ revives UK funky, putting an unstoppable groove front and centre, and ‘Feelings’ twists a label-mandated guest feature from J Hus into an afrobeats-inspired heater.

While the first half of the album is by far the most exciting, the more formulaic tracks from the weaker second side aren’t always exhausting. ‘Greatest Gift’ presents another treat of a feature from Lila Iké, and closer ‘What if my heart beats faster?’ finally sees her unleash her gorgeous voice beyond the album’s mostly restrained runs. Smith might be falling by this point, but she’s often landing in familiar territory. By comparison, even the damp ‘GO GO GO’s acoustic guitars and pop-punk drums are intriguing in their confused inclusion. It’s hardly surprising that given the choice of falling or flying, the latter triumphs. Smith uses the album to confront the here and now, working with producer duo DAMEDAME* across all 16 tracks to make sense of mid-air.

Lost Girls — Selvutsletter (smalltown supersound) Anyone can feasibly write, record, and release music, but Jenny Hval is distinct because she should – because she’s compelled to. Such bulky archives – she’s near-enough released an album a year since her 2011 solo debut – suggest that if she didn’t write, record, and release music she would explode.

Fellow Lost Girl Hårvard Volden is the same, and Selvutsletter, their second under the Lost Girls moniker, is the latest box of lucid pop experimentalism to slide off this perpetually whirring conveyor.

It’s also the optimal entry point into either of the Norwegian songwriters’ projects. Selvutsletter is an alluring, enveloping mixture of avant-garde intrigue (faux-folk singing, tone poems) packaged with the right amount of dancy pop pleasantry. You can hear formidable feminist experimentalists such as Björk, Laurie Anderson, and Kate Bush echo through Hval’s spectral lilts – there’s no doubt she’s in league with her predecessors – and Volden’s contributions are equally indispensable. He treats his guitar like it’s a synthesizer, underscoring Hval with atypical inversions and dense, swelling soundscapes that land between Reich and Eno. Presumably, they counterbalance one another, pushing farther than the radio-ready conventions of last year’s Classic Objects, but nearer to home base than Hval’s vampire-themed concept album Blood Bitch. This is the medicinal sweet-spot, with room for the yodeling valleys of ‘World on Fire’, the off-kilter

Albums click-clacks of ‘Timed Intervals’, the funereal saxophone groans of ‘Ruins’, and the delicate sentimentality of ‘June 1996’. Selvutsletter is a record to sit with, to get lost in. The world looks a little different when you emerge. 8/10 Hayden Merrick

Woods — Perennial (woodsist) New York folk-rock band Woods never seem to stop, releasing 11 albums in only 13 years.

Their 12th, Perennial, is a funky, soothing addition to the laidback discography Woods are known for, as somewhere between crunchy granola and beachy psychedelics, Woods have found their sweet spot.

The album is primarily instrumental, using vocals sparingly on just a few tracks. This sparsity works to the band’s advantage, allowing vocals to make the biggest impact when they do crop up.

However, there’s still a hypnotic quality to all of the songs that makes listening to it feel like falling down a rabbit hole, unsure of which way is up or down, start or finish.

The album title and song names imply a meditation on time, days and seasons passing while personal journeys progress.

Ironically, it can make the record feel like a closed loop, starting over again before you’ve realized the last song ended.

Maybe that’s part of the message, though.

Seasons change and come again, allowing everyone the opportunity for rebirth and revision. When songs blend together, they’re building on each other to create the musical equivalent of a year. Our experiences snowball as our lives move forward, but the memory of the past is always with us.

Superstar tracks like ‘Sip of Happiness’ and ‘Little Black Flowers’ show what Woods are capable of, compositionally and technically. However, buried

in the middle of the album, these great songs get lost, a little smothered by the scale of a wider record that could have been cut a bit shorter to emphasize the emotional impact listeners crave. 6/10 Isabel Crabtree

Nation Of Language — Strange Disciple (pias) Strange Disciple, Nation of Language’s third full-length record, has been described by the trio (made up of Ian Devaney, Aidan Noell and Alex MacKay) as the ‘wayfarer’ album; a body of work which exists precisely nowhere, consisting of songs all written whilst in transit between different locations on their seemingly unending world tour. And indeed, this collection of cybernetic, synthy pop tunes do feel slightly lost in today’s newrelease climate.

If you were to wedge this album in between those of OMD, Gary Numan and the Jesus and Mary Chain, Strange Disciple might become slightly easier to locate (it’s certainly not difficult to guess where this band get their sonic kicks from).

Here, Nation of Language have produced such a convincing imitation of new wave that people may frown at the 2023 release date in years to come, convinced that the date must refer to some kind of 40th anniversary repress.

Whilst this record may lack much stylistic disparity across each track, I can’t argue with the fact that Nation of Language’s late-’80s pastiche is very well executed. Songs such as ‘Weak In Your Light’ and ‘Swimming In The Shallow Sea’ are brilliantly written ballads with catchy synthesised hooks. The latter track is a clear standout on the album for its crunchy, sustained power chords reminiscent of some of the best shoegaze.

However, tracks like ‘Sole Obsession’ and ‘I Will Never Learn’ are so similar that

I found myself wondering whether the needle had skipped back to the beginning of the record without my doing so.

Strange Disciple is undeniably an impressive record, but one which exists without the artistic focus or originality to garner much lasting interest. 5/10 Leo Lawton

Jlin — Perspective (planet mu) Jlin, an artist of massive ambition and passion, has blessed us again – this time with Perspective, a six-track enigma.

Known for breaking genre boundaries with her risk-taking compositions, she has garnered a highly respected and renowned name for herself – culminating in a Pulitzer nomination this year – creating music aiming for a futuristic utopian world.

Influenced by percussive, postfootwork guided with a dash of IDM and EDM, Jlin has a real deep talent for making sonic puzzles. The record kicks off with ‘Paradigm’, a track that dives into an intelligent world of progressive yet provocative rhythm, slowly breaking down the beat but keeping the momentum we need for the next track ‘Obscure’ which speaks for itself being a glitchedout footwork dancefloor workout.

‘Fourth Perspective’ starts off with an eerie progressive melody, followed by deep dubby drums that add a pure emotional groove that flows through you, one of those head down, hood up on the dancefloor kind of scenes. ‘Derivative’ builds on minimal trap breaks and repetitive, fluid beats, adding a robotic bite to original footwork rhythms. ‘Dissonance’ combines tribal percussion and soft subbass obscured by ringing bells, building a sensual tempo; it’s short but sweet and followed by ‘Duality’, a real ethereal finish to an endearing and eclectic story. 7/10 Jazz Brown

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Albums Live

End Of The Road Festival Larmer Tree Gardens, Dorset 31 August – 3 September 2023

Another year, another near-perfect End Of The Road. At this point, they really know what they’re doing, their detail-sweating curation providing a more-or-less unmatched combination of high-grade alternative rock, idyllic folk, jazzy indeterminacy and late-night euphoria. As veterans of the festival, we felt like this was a vintage year – here are a few reasons why.

THE SECRET SETS FELT PARTICULARLY EXCITING

With Saturday’s penultimate Woods stage slot having been kept tightly under wraps until the moment Wet Leg took to the stage (well, in theory anyway), seeing one of the biggest, buzziest bands of the last few years bounce out in front of the Larmer Tree crowd was a refreshingly delirious moment of joy. Wherever you stand on Wet Leg – and as our writer Sam Walton pointed out in his online review of their set itself, after this many backlashes it’s sort of boring to performatively criticise them, and far more fun for all involved to just enjoy it for what it is – it’s probably fair

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to say that their Harry Styles-approved pop-rock occupies the more mainstream end of the End Of The Road spectrum.

This is a festival by and for dedicated music nerds, and it’s all the more brilliant for it; but just occasionally, it’s quite nice to see a few thousand people properly let loose to big, sugary pop music, expressing their appreciation with singalongs and pogoing rather than an approving swig of cider and a “Well that was lovely, wasn’t it?” to a bearded friend after the final song. The surprise element (whatever was left of it) definitely added to that sense of silly catharsis, and the same could be said for the (slightly smaller scale but no less enjoyable) late-night secret sets on the Folly stage throughout the weekend from the likes of Be Your Own Pet, The Mary Wallopers, Personal Trainer and PVA.

END OF THE ROAD KNOWS HOW TO GET WEIRD

As demonstrated by the likes of Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs and The Chisel last year, for a relatively sophisticated festival that built its reputation on leftfield indie, earnest folk and sun-dappled Americana, End Of The Road knows how to throw in some noisy, eccentric curveballs from time to time. This year, it was Divide And Dissolve who brought the heavi-

est set of the weekend, their vast doom metal soundscapes crashing out over the Big Top crowd like a reservoir bursting a failing dam. Takiaya Reed, the duo’s saxophonist, guitarist and spokesperson, is a phenomenal presence, her brief discussion of their work’s postcolonial politics and abolitionist commitment midway through the set adding even more weight to the volcanic noise that followed. We’ve said it before in L&Q, but it bears repeating: Divide And Dissolve are the coolest, most radical thing to happen to metal in ages.

Another transcendentally loud, adventurous set came courtesy of Guatemalan cellist and singer Mabe Fratti. Accompanied by a satisfyingly shred-heavy guitar player and compellingly erratic drummer, Fratti’s angelic, pinwheeling vocals and slab-like chunks of distorted cello combined in all kinds of unexpected and beautiful ways, one minute sounding like Sunn o))) collaborating with the Cocteau Twins, the next like Grimes remixing Talk Talk with some help from Tony Iommi. Constantly explorative and almost overwhelmingly powerful at times, this might just have been the highlight of the weekend.

HATS

Was it just us, or were a lot of people wearing stuff on their heads that made them look like background characters in Noddy? Nothing particularly good or bad to say about them, it was just a bit weird.

Although we could have some very bad things to say about the little crusty man who repeatedly played a ska version of Radiohead’s ‘My Iron Lung’ on acoustic guitar next to where we were camping.

He was wearing one of them too, and not much else – what a zany character!

THERE’S STILL NOBODY LIKE FUTURE ISLANDS

Having to follow a rapturously-received surprise Wet Leg set would seem a daunt-

photography by sophie barloc

Albums Live ing task to most bands. Yet if anything Saturday night headliners Future Islands seemed energised by the gauntlet laid down by their predecessors on the Woods stage, and delivered one of the shows of the weekend. The hooks are huge, the arrangements swooping and stately, the band lock-tight; but let’s be honest, it’s all about Samuel T Herring.

The most charismatic man in indie gurned, paced, crabwalked and growled through his set like a man possessed, so committed and convincing in his melodic evangelism that it’s a surprise no audience members were speaking in tongues by the time they played ‘Seasons (Waiting On You)’. Almost a decade on from that Letterman performance that saw them break through to a global audience, their blend of New Order instrumentation, hyper-emotional heartland hooks and death metal barks still really doesn’t work on paper; but on record and especially live, it really really does.

HOOKS ARE BACK

After a few years of irritable men in clothes that don’t fit monotoning over spiky riffs to varying degrees of success, it’s nice to see a new wave of underground bands turning back towards melody a bit.

Whether it’s the spiralling mood shifts

of Mary In The Junkyard, the pristine indie-folk of Lilo, the sardonic choruses of Bar Italia or the pastoral complexity of Sculpture, the sound of voices and instruments moving up and down rather than sideways and backwards feels particularly refreshing now that the whole sprechgesang post-punk thing seems to be reaching its limit. Don’t get us wrong, there’s still much to love in the work of talky bands Black Country, New Road or Dry Cleaning, but as even those groups seem to be opening up to more diverse sounds these days, the seeds of something freshly melodic are beginning to germinate, suggesting intriguing new innovations to come.

THE TALKING HEADS STAGE GETS BETTER EVERY YEAR

At one point, the Saturday of the festival looked liked it might have peaked before lunchtime, and not with a musical set but with an onstage interview with Turner Prize-winning conceptual artist Jeremy Deller – a reminder that End Of The Road’s Talking Heads Stage Q&As (and its late-night comedy bill) are increasingly worth the ticket alone.

A natural, hay bale ampitheatre clinging to a steep slope in the woods, the stage itself is a contender for the festival’s

most picturesque, even if The (Victorian) Garden Stage is more widely considered End Of The Road’s real looker. As well as the talkers, the same spot routinely hosts some of the festival’s most contemplative music too, like Brazilian minimalist Sessa this year, who grips people to their grassy benches with his mellow tropicalia performed on a solo acoustic guitar.

It’s Deller’s conversation that is a masterclass in interviewing, though, and we spend just as much time impressed by the interviewer’s questions as we do Deller’s responses (perhaps because we’re interview dweebs ourselves), which are hilariously blunt at points, as he discusses his life in political art, as chronicled in his new book Art Is Magic.

SIMPLY, THEY HATE CHANGE

Immediately after all that talking, Tampa duo They Hate Change got us back on track with what can only be described as the weekend’s most triumphant hour: they brought their UK-obsessed hip hop to a quarter full Loud And Quiet Big Top tent, and left it to one that way was standing (or jumping) room only.

Andre “Dre” Gainey and Vonne Parks deserve to be huge stars in our country’s rap and club scenes, and not only because they know more about jungle, garage, D&B and grime than most of us who’ve grown up with it on our doorsteps: they are so tightly rehearsed and locked-in to one another, rapidly trading bars and linking legs as they frantically hop left and right, that the whole crowd goes with their distinct American English party rap, as word clearly spreads around the site. The pair are made up by the response to the party they’ve created, at one point shouting out South London and Camberwell, where much of their beloved British music has come from. It’s moments like this – when a giant crowd of people seem to discover something they didn’t think they would at EOTR – that makes the festival more eclectic (and its audience more curious) than it’s sometimes given credit for.

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FilmAlbums and Books

Stop Making Sense (4K Remaster) (dir. jonathan demme) I was recently back at my parents’, sat in the living room, my dad flicking between channels in a post-dinner lull. He’s still got a fondness for the outer reaches of Freeview, and that particular evening stumbled upon David Byrne’s American Utopia. The show was a lauded spectacle, tastefully stylised and impeccably choreographed. It was a success, but a success that was forever to be compared to Byrne’s first foray into concert film, a release whose shadow is cast across the whole genre.

Tonight, as I sit in the BFI IMAX, gazing up at an eternally youthful Byrne gyrating on a screen the size of a building, the impact of Stop Making Sense is the same as it ever was. The film is a definitive statement on Talking Heads, bringing together the arthouse sensibilities of the group as well as their unrivalled prowess as a live act. In a discography as well-regarded as theirs, the live record The Name of This Band Is Talking Heads is a fan favourite, but their truest representation remains Stop Making Sense, a work that revels in the artifice of the stage show, of film, of the idea of a rock concert.

As amalgam of four nights of footage, the show builds from the humble sight of Byrne stood with acoustic guitar and boombox to a full extended lineup of players. Stages are constructed and musicians join track-by-track, all in clear view, nothing hidden. The second track is a particularly moving rendition of ‘Heaven’, performed solely by Byrne and bassist Tina Weymouth. Just as you become transfixed, the sight of stagehands break into the middle distance, pushing a drum platform.

The combination is perfect; the profound in the ordinary, transcendence penetrated or accelerated by the mundane; ideas that have punctuate the music of Talking Heads

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throughout their career.

The film’s lasting triumph is that it celebrates the act of collaboration, something that underpins not only the film but the band’s legacy. It works because it is constructed as an ensemble piece; as each performer is introduced, they are established as their own entity, unique musicians with unique temperaments. The frostiness that has plagued the group in subsequent decades is nowhere to be seen.

Likewise, for all of Byrne’s supposed megalomania, he remains very much a part of the band here. Sure, his frantic dancing, impassioned vocals and absurdist prop comedy are a designed and necessary focal point to the piece, but the most heartwarming and intimate moments are the shots that show Weymouth beaming over at him with joy and amazement.

It’s this dynamic balancing act of theatre and reality, of humour and earnestness, that remains the film’s lasting appeal. It is an ode to the act of doing, and the utter transcendence that can be produced in the process. Oskar Jeff

This Must Be The Place — Shain Shapiro (repeater) We all know that music has inherent value; that it enriches our lives and often forms the raw material for the social bonds which mean the most to us.

Yet the inherent, almost metaphysical nature of this value is a double-edged sword: it’s reassuring to know that music is innate to us, but it’s also easy to dismiss the necessity to pay or plan for something that comes so naturally yet has an amazing capacity to exist without physical form. It’s easily seen as “nice-to-have”, as author and policy advisor Shain Shapiro describes it, rather than something that needs economic and political support.

In This Must Be The Place: How Music Can Make Your City Better, Shapiro makes a compelling case for a total reshaping of the way we understand how music works as a cultural form, how it should be materially supported, and as the title suggests, how it can be used within a wider consideration of urban planning, social policy and educational infrastructure. The book’s basic premise is that once music is centred in the way that a city is designed and governed, not only do local musicians and fans benefit in the short term, the whole way that the city operates improves over time too; as he frames it early in the book, “Planning, zoning, development and regeneration policies, the relationship between alcohol and law enforcement, a city’s drive to recruit, retain and attract talent, the effectiveness of its tourism board – all are touched by music. So is affordable housing and issues of racial equity and justice.”

As a prism through which to understand the way a city functions (how its demographics interact, how its economy works, how it feels to live there) music, in its broadest sense, both as an aesthetic form and as a set of dynamic cultural relations, is genuinely effective. The book does get a little dry and policy-focused – no matter how worthy the ideas are or how zealous the writing might be, passages about nightlife regulations in mid-sized American cities are never going to surge off the page – but such a serious intervention, which seeks to meet policy makers and local officials (i.e. nerds) on their own terms, has to be welcomed in a context of plummeting arts funding and the kind of urban planning that’s making so many cities in the UK and beyond borderline unlivable for anyone other than the very wealthy and extremely boring. There are a few idiosyncrasies – I’m not sure many fans of club or underground music in London would be so positive about the office of the Night Czar as Shapiro, and the fully automated luxury DIY scene he conjures in the epilogue sounds a bit more Brave New World than the author probably intended – but this is a refreshing, enthusiastic, pragmatic piece of work that deserves to be taken seriously by those with the power to put its ideas into practice.

Luke Cartledge.

The Streets

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Mike Skinner has been busier than you think since he originally ended THE STREETS in 2011. Next month, he’s not just returning with the project’s first album in 12 years, but a debut feature film that he’s made pretty much by himself over the past decade. As he tells Stuart Stubbs in the final days of the movie’s completion, it’s been a lot, and he’s not sure how he’s going to feel once it’s over

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days later

Photography by Jonangelo Molinari

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N THE DAY that Trump was elected, Mike Skinner came to the Loud And Quiet office to record an episode of our podcast, Midnight Chats. Talk of The Streets was off the table, because The Streets was over, and had been for five years. “I genuinely never want to rap again,” Skinner had written in the closing pages of his 2012 memoir, The Story Of The Streets, and there’s only so many times you can talk about a project you started at the age of 20, however genre-defining that project instantly became.

Just as Skinner knew The Streets had to end when it originally did, fans accepted the decision partly because of how neat a parcel it was – five albums over ten years, spanning the entirety of Mike Skinner’s raging 20s: a perfect arc of a young man who’d been going to the same regional clubs as the rest of us, who went from kebab shop shit-chat to Top of The Pops and the Brit Awards, to having perhaps too good a time, to running himself into the ground, to a soft landing by the time music trends had moved on and he’d turned 30. “There’s no margin in being the Liberace of geezer garage,” he wrote in his book.

Podcast gold, you could call stories from that decade, but it wasn’t as if Skinner – the definition of a workaholic – hadn’t generated just as many talking points in his fledgling postStreets career. On the table, then, were: Tonga, his greenballoon-themed bassline club night, then hosted in London, Birmingham, Berlin, Copenhagen and Glasgow, with rapper and friend Murkage Dave; the hip-hop documentaries he’d made for Vice; his own rap/news podcast, Peak Times; a new record label called Mike Skinner Ltd, and the artists he was producing for it; and the bags of cash he’d made from writing the music for The Inbetweeners Movie, on which he took a percentage of the film’s profits, only for it to become the highest grossing British comedy of all time. He had started rapping again too, under the name The Darker The Shadow The Brighter The Light, dropping standalone tracks online whenever he felt like it. And he’d begun writing a movie, set in Britain’s clubland.

The songs as The Darker The Shadow The Brighter The Light momentarily dropped offline around the time Skinner announced a surprise Streets reunion tour in 2017, which sold out at a rate that proved that the tidiness of The Streets’ lifespan was no substitute for The Streets itself. A new mixtape, None Of Us Are Getting Out Of This Life Alive, was released in 2020’s lockdown, featuring Tame Impala, IDLES, Greentea Peng and others. Next month we’ll get the first Streets album in 12 years, along with Mike Skinner’s debut feature film – the one he spoke about on the podcast, which he’s written, directed, starred in, edited, and done everything else for. Funded, even.

Both the album and the film have taken the name The Darker The Shadow The Brighter The Light.

I’ve wanted to ask him what changed in that year between us meeting, when The Streets was something he was so completely done with, and the sudden resurrection of it all, ever since. And over lunch, in a pub across the road from where The Streets live band were rehearsing for a tour that started earlier this month, Skinner needed no time to contemplate my question: “I mean, I’ve said this before, but the reason I stopped doing The Streets was to make a film. And the reason I started it again was to make

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a film.” It’s like when he was younger, when he was back home in Birmingham, straight out of college and going to house nights that played garage, at clubs like The Steering Wheel, where ‘Weak Become Heroes’ and ‘Blinded By The Lights’ were set in his mind.

His plan was to get a £1500 grant from The Prince’s Trust and start his own record label. To qualify he had to be unemployed, so he duly complied, signing on for six months and writing the business plan they’d asked for. “And at the end of it they were like, ‘nah, sorry’.” In that moment he realised that he could have taken all of the available shifts at his previous Burger King job and raised the money he needed himself.

“With the film, I’ve always understood that you either do the film thing,” he says, “taking a short [movie] to festivals and all of that, and I think I’m probably a bit too old to go around putting a short through. Because I’ve done so many shorts and so many music videos, the idea of making a short and taking it around festivals to get twthree million quid to make a British film... It sort of became obvious that if I just did The Streets again it wouldn’t necessarily fund it, but certainly help it.”

T THE TIME of our lunch, Skinner is three weeks away from the biggest deadline of his life. After 10 years of working on The Darker The Shadow The Brighter The Light, it’s nearly, finally finished. Next to the band’s rehearsal studio he’s taken over an office in order to edit and colour grade the film whilst practising for the live tour that starts the day the film is due. And then he’ll continue editing and grading once he gets home. “It’s a nightmare,” he says as we sit down. “Yeah. I bit off way more than I can chew.”

Two million quid became three million for the film’s proposed budget, and before Covid Skinner worked with a production company in order to develop his script and seek funding. When the money didn’t materialise he decided to foot the bill and make it himself, taking on every conceivable role in a film production team. “And it’s been dirt cheap,” he says.

“I think it’s only cost something like a hundred and something thousand pounds, rather than three million. It’s literally broken me in the process, but there it is.”

Skinner has a history of this kind of industriousness, reaching back to when he started making Original Pirate Material in a cupboard in his bedroom, wrapped in a duvet, in 2001. It’s what’s always made The Streets such a singular project, with Skinner working alone and without compromise, fuelled by bloody-mindedness and obsession. Along the way, he’s educated himself in the necessary fields to ensure that The Streets remains completely in his image, reading countless theory books on songwriting to improve his craft and attending a screenwriting course by Hollywood storytelling consultant Robert McKee in one dedicated move that led directly to what many consider his masterpiece, second album, the very British rap soap opera A Grand Don’t Come For Free. He started directing his own music videos around his third album, learning by doing – “That was my film school” – and spent some of his short time living in New York in 2005, at the height of his fame, sitting in on A&R meetings at Atlantic Records in order to more fully understand how the hip-hop industry he’d loved since hearing De La Soul and Wu Tang operated.

Perhaps he gets his appetite for self-motivated learning from his father, whose advice was never to choose one career and lock it in for life, but to try something out, see if you like it, and if you don’t, give something else a go, for as many times as you want or need to. Although Skinner says: “I guess it’s a control thing. And it’s also a fear thing. But there is a logic to it – we got to the end of the film and we needed Foley [the rerecording of hundreds of overdubbed sounds that practically all movies need]. 30 grand!? I think I’ll do it myself.”

Needless to say, Skinner is as exhausted and stressed as you’d almost hope him to be, but also self-deprecating and still in possession of his sense of humour. “I’m currently at the stage where it doesn’t feel worth it,” he says, which sounds like it isn’t a joke. “Definitely. But I’m also heartened by stories of other people pretty much going mad doing this.

“Because of the music video thing [making a lot of them and working with others who also make them], I got to know quite a few directors. And all of the directors I know that have made a film, when you see them at the screening or whatever, they’re just completely ruined. ‘Don’t do it! It’s not worth it!’.

That’s where I am at the moment.” He says this with a big laugh, and recalls the documentary about Quadrophenia he was watching on YouTube in the early hours of this morning (he’s not been sleeping much recently) – “They were all fucked up making that, so that made me feel a bit better.”

When I ask him how he found the acting side of things (he plays a version of himself in the movie – a small-time club DJ called Mike who gets mixed up in a drug deal gone wrong and a dancefloor murder), he says: “I literally couldn’t give a fuck. I’ve got so much to think about I couldn’t give a fuck. At the point of me having to say something, it was like, ‘right, what’s the line?

Let’s move on.’ I’m not expecting to win any awards for that. But it had to be me,” he reasons, “because the music is the voiceover.

When the music plays in the film, that’s the voiceover.”

It’s easy to forget that there’s a new Streets album too, despite it being the first since 2011’s Computers and Blues. Skinner’s perhaps forgotten himself, considering “the music has been sat around for 10 years.” At one point he tells me: “Because the film is so hideous and difficult – like unrelenting – actually, the music, I found really nice. Like, if you’ve got a headache, snap your ankle.

That’s the joke, but I’m realising that it’s really true – I feel like all of your emotions are only in comparison to your other ones. Some of the most unhappy times I’ve had in my life were when absolutely everything was perfect. And it’s not because ‘actually it’s really bad’ – it’s not really bad. Having loads of money when you’re young is amazing, but you just get used to it. You know, you’re that person who’s like, ‘where are my grapes?’ sort of thing. And it creeps in. ‘There’s a white sofa on the rider, why isn’t it here!? I can’t possibly go on stage!’ Thankfully, it never got that bad, but because your emotions are only comparative to other ones, it’s a bit like an addiction, where you need more of it to get high.” So all Mike Skinner needs to do to continue to enjoy making music is make a feature film to accompany each album, I say, which he laughs at even though it deserves a punch in the face.

But even if the enormity of the movie does overshadow the album for Skinner right now, it’s a big deal for Streets fans, whose

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most common reaction to his social media posts – be it a preview of a new track, show announcements or holiday photos with his wife and children – is the goat emoji. It’s hard to argue against its sentiment in this instance, and you’d do just as well to overstate the importance and rarity of The Streets – not just its influence on British music, which can be heard more in Arctic Monkeys than it can the grime MCs who consider Skinner something of a cultural father figure, but in how unique the project has always sounded, from ‘Has It Come To This?’ to new single ‘Too Much Yayo’.

When The Streets arrived in 2001, nobody could believe that there was a guy rapping in a British accent. Was it even rapping? And why had he laced his garage beats with samples of orchestras? We were still a year away from the birth of grime and Dizzee Rascal’s Boy In Da Corner, and as huge as UK garage had become, its MCs were more respected for getting a party going in a basement club in Southend than for what they were saying on the mic. Mike Skinner largely slowed down the beat and put more emphasis on lyrics, mixing garage and hip-hop and telling stories that people actually cared about, however frivolous tales of drinking, drugging and dancing may now seem from a distance.

It was, after all, what inner city Brits were doing, and most of us could relate to it a lot more than we could to Jay-Z when he rapped: “I was raised in the projects, roaches and rats / Smokers out back selling their mama’s sofa… Me under a lamppost, why I got my hand closed? Crack’s in my palm, watching the long arm of the law.” The best part of a night out was often talking about it the morning after, and that’s exactly what The Streets did, with an unfiltered wit that allowed for lines like, “Er, hello, my name’s Tim and I’m a criminal / In the eyes of society, I need to be in jail / For the choice of herbs I inhale” (‘The Irony Of It All’), and, soon after, “What do I give a fuck? I’ve got a girlfriend anyway” (‘Fit But You Know It’). Each track on The Streets’ debut felt like it belonged to a different hour of the day, and Skinner had a particular skill for a loading a hazy late-nighter like ‘Weak Become Heroes’ with an almost scientific dose of melancholy and euphoria, that distilled the feeling of walking home half cut into a 5-minute pop song.

The Streets progressed more than it’s often given credit for, even if Original Pirate Material and A Grand Don’t Come For Free proved to be an impossible standard to maintain. People struggled with The Hardest Way To Make An Easy Living – Skinner’s first album as a famous, rich man, which was about exactly that (as Drake repeated on his third album, Nothing Was The Same) – but at least he was trying something new and continuing to make music about the life he was genuinely living. And the beats (dub reggae, rock, garage, jazz, classical) remained as esoteric throughout; as wholly Mike Skinner as his unmistakeable spoken rap vocal. The same goes for Everything Is Borrowed, which purposefully made no reference to modern life, eschewed self-indulgence and sounded more like Skinner fronting an upbeat live band – The Streets anti-donk record, even if Skinner would soon remix Susan Boyle’s ‘I Dreamed A Dream’ to hilarious and devastating effect, which the Guardian expertly tagged “I Dreamed A Donk”.

The album of The Darker The Shadow The Brighter The Light follows suit, as an album that sounds like it could only be The Streets, and one that captures how Skinner was living when

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he made it – touring as a DJ. He says that new single ‘Too Much Yayo’, which opens the record and the movie, “encompasses everything in one song,” starting with a down tempo, headnodding verse before it opens out into a whomping bassline. “It sounds very similar to when I DJ because when I DJ I’ll play a Travis Scott record and then a bassline record from Stoke,” he says. “The album was written to sounds like me DJing.”

As Skinner says, the record is the movie’s voiceover, but it’s not as similar to A Grand Don’t Come For Free as that sounds, even though it was that narrative concept album that sowed the initial seed of Mike Skinner wanting to make a feature film, 20 years ago.

“Obviously, I went back to A Grand Don’t Come For Free, for the first time since I wrote it,” he says in the pub. “In my head, when I was writing the film, before I did the music, it was going to be a bit like that. Because what I did with that album was talk about all the stuff I was doing, but I dramatise it a bit. And it’s the same now – I’m DJing and hanging around, and I’ve dramatised it a bit. So I kind of thought it would be the same. But if you take A Grand Don’t Come For Free and drop that onto a stage, it becomes very on the nose. So what I decided very early on with the record is that I’m only ever commenting on what is going on, rather than describing what’s going on, so you’ve got no idea what’s going to happen in the film just from listening to the album.”

The title track is a case in point. A rickety curveball that hangs on a Roaring ’20s jazz trumpet sample, it speaks mainly in metaphors similar to its title and gives nothing away. “That’s in a casino scene,” Skinner tells me before pausing.

“I’m used to being able to control everything,” he then says. “With music you can literally get exactly what you imagine when you’ve got infinite time to work on it. So I’m used to being able to control everything. But with a film… like, if I read the script now, I can access two different films. The film I saw in my head and the film that we’ve got. And they’re different.”

“Are you ok with them being different?” I ask.

“Yeah. I’m learning all the time. It’s all new. I definitely went into this thinking, ‘well, it’s 90 minutes. That’s basically 30 music videos, and I’ve certainly done 30 music videos in the last 6 years, so it’s just that.’ But the thing that’s difficult about a film is maintaining the story. Music videos, you have an idea but you build it in the edit; it’s not like that with a film. If you go through that door in a red t-shirt, you better arrive on the other side of that door in a red t-shirt, and you better not have shaved your head. And those scenes might have been filmed months apart.”

He says he currently has a problem in the edit with a character who has blonde hair in one scene and not in the next. “That’s the stuff that keeps you awake at night.”

HE NEXT TIME I see Skinner is at our photo shoot, at the Everyman cinema in Muswell Hill. The chain will host a national screening tour of The Darker The Shadow The Brighter The Light in two weeks’ time.

We’re now five days away from his deadline. “I’m quite stressed,” he says when I ask him how he’s doing, but once again it doesn’t appear to have affected his mood, as he proceeds to school our photographer in his own gear, clocking the lights he’s using and discussing the development of photographic film, keen to pick

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up more knowledge from someone who might be able to teach him something. When he nerds out about the fixtures on the light stands, comparing them to the cheaper ones he used on the film so he could jump on and off train with them, his wife Claire, who’s come with him, suggests that he’d be just as happy living life as a photographer’s assistant. He fully agrees.

For now, he’s been combatting stress by becoming obsessed with cruises, and in particular a cruising review YouTube channel called ‘Cruising with Ben and David’, which he instantly sells me on. He says he can’t quite imagine what he’s going to do once the film is finished, so he’d been thinking he might go on a cruise, and he’s been researching the subject exhaustively.

A couple of days later he sent me the opening 25 minutes of the movie, which has already been described as a tripped-out noir murder mystery. A big influence has been the novels of Raymond Chandler, where bourbon-drinking private eye Philip Marlowe cracks cases the cops are too clean for, by straight-talking LA lowlifes and their businessmen bosses, operating just inside the law and getting involved with women who he suspects might get him killed. You know the type of story even if you haven’t read The Big Sleep or watched D.O.A. (another influence) – they typically start with a voiceover that goes something like: “I knew she was trouble the moment she stepped in from the rain.”

The Darker The Shadow The Brighter The Light isn’t set in 1940s Los Angeles; it takes place in modern day Britain, in the clubbing world that Skinner has gotten to know very well since The Streets originally ended. But I can instantly see how Chandler and classic noir movies have left their mark; particularly in the dialogue, which sings like the words of Philip Marlowe; how fans of the genre (myself included) wish we all spoke now – cooler, more lyrical and with absolute purpose. “I don’t usually like compliments, but that’s clinging to the things I tell myself,” says Skinner’s lead character shortly after meeting his femme fatale. “It poured itself really, I just held on to keep up appearances,” he says when she thanks him for the whiskey he just poured, itself a trait of from the boozy, perma-smoking genre.

I can see what Skinner means about the music narrating the film, and how it comments on the action rather than describes it like A Grand Don’t Come For Free did. It makes those moments feel like abstract music videos, while the straight dialogue in between has the offbeat strangeness of an art house movie that borders on the surreal – at different points in just 25 minutes I get The Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour, Mark Jenkin’s 2019 overdubbed masterpiece Bait and, on one occasion in Skinner’s delivery, Wayne’s World. Which can only be a good thing.

“I never enjoy anything I’ve made,” Skinner told me when we were in the pub. “What I’ve learned is to trust myself. All of the time, I’m working to my tastes. I’m tailor-making stuff to my own taste, so I’ve learned over the years that it’s always to my taste, exactly, if I spend enough time on it.

“I think when I was younger I was aiming for this objective thing. And it’s really not that. It’s completely subjective. You’re just relying on there being enough people out there who have the same taste as you, who appreciate the work you put in to making something to your taste. Actually, the worst thing you can do is stop doing it to your taste and stop being so selfish.”

“It sort of became obvious that if I just did The Streets again it wouldn’t necessarily fund the film, but certainly help it”

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“I’m currently at the stage where it doesn’t feel worth it. But I’m also heartened by stories of other people pretty much going mad doing this!”

When I asked him how he thinks it’s going to feel releasing a film that he’s spend so long working on, his response was: “I think it’s probably quite shit. But I’m just so looking forward to not having this feeling. Because this feeling has been years and years and years. And it’s a mental health thing. It’s like I’ve got this condition and it’s the film. And no amount of therapy can help me, until I finish the film. Sadly. So all I can think about is that diagnosable disorder being cured by putting it out. Thankfully people seem to like the music. Or they don’t hate the music. I mean, it would be nice if it doesn’t sink and die after two weeks, because I’ve had that happen, where you work hard on stuff and then it just sinks. But that’s the dominant feeling of a creative really.”

“You don’t really think it’s shit though, do you?” I asked.

“No, the film is exactly – and I’m not joking – it’s exactly the way I want it. Exactly. And I think what I’m probably trying to say is that I really know that. Most albums, I think they’re going to take a year and they take two, and this has been 10 years, and it’s a completely different thing.

“I think one of the gifts of this is that it’s been so hard that I’m genuinely going to be over the moon when it’s done. And I don’t think anyone will be able to take that away from me. But you can’t not want people to like stuff – that’s ridiculous. But it is what it is. And also, there isn’t any pressure really. If we’d taken three million quid, I think we would have been in a different position and doing a lot of interviews with film people.”

From what I know of Mike Skinner, I can’t imagine him ever working like that, with a committee looking over his shoulder and asking where their money’s been spent. He admits he can’t imagine that either.

I’ve also always had a vision of him as a romantic optimist beneath the branded lighters and Stella-lobbing crowds. It’s the way his albums end, in particular: ‘Stay Positive’, the happy version of ‘Empty Cans’ coming after the unhappy, the gospel spirituality of ‘The Escapist’. Even his new album closes with a track called ‘Good Old Daze’. Skinner’s not so sure on this one. “I don’t know the answer to that,” he says, “but I remember when we did The Hardest Way To Make An Easy Living everyone was saying that it was heavy and that it needed to be nicer. I think it would have been even more depressing had I done that alone.

“But I’ve never really thought about it. Am I an optimist? I just take things incredibly slowly. I’m really impatient but I take ages to do something. Maybe what you’re getting though – it’s not me, it’s the fact that I do endings. Because I think stories have endings, but albums don’t.”

I ask if that’s also why he ended The Streets in 2011 – because he wanted it to have a constructed ending?

“No,” he says. “It was because I’d been doing the same thing and I ran out of ideas. It was obvious really. I wanted to make a film, and I didn’t write any lyrics for six or seven years.

And it was mad, I had no desire to write lyrics – I was DJing and producing stuff and directing. I had absolutely no desire, and then it was really organic. Something in my mind made me really miss it. I hadn’t stopped for 10 years, and I think my brain was just exhausted. But it was quite weird. Because I write songs, I perform them, I DJ, I direct. Every different one scratches a different itch, and there’s a certain thing with words that nothing else really does. Words are really cool, and you can’t scratch that itch by DJing.”

Exclusive to Loud And Quiet subscribers, this month’s limited edition flexi disc is ‘Don’t Judge The Book’ by The Darker The Shadow The Brighter The Light, aka The Streets Mike Skinner: The album that’s coming out – I’ve had that for a while, years really, and the film and music kind of wrap around each other. I also knew I needed other music to score it out and to fill in some of the gaps once the filming started, so I made some more music and we put it out there to plant some seeds. I called that ‘extra’ album “The Streets” by “The Darker The Shadow The Brighter The Light” [released digitally in 2021].

The song ‘Don’t Judge The Book’ – it’s quite literal, honestly: sometimes a

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film can let down the original text, sometimes it’s the other way round. My film – the music, the film, it’s all so interwoven, but I would hope either can be enjoyed separately. It’s been a lifelong ambition and project, and it’s been over a decadelong obsession. Everything has geared towards this so everything I made – even the mixtape we did – was testing some film ideas and buying time when the pandemic came; everything has led up to this moment. A lot of the songs from that album (The Streets by TDTSTBTL) have made it into the film – and I hope that makes it all make more sense now.

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With End of the Day, a new instrumental record developed from the soundtrack to her 2021 documentary Anonymous Club, Courtney Barnett eschews the rich lyricism that made her a star in favour of something more abstract, but no less moving.

It’s also the final release on her cult indie label Milk! Records, which she’s decided to close after a decade of great work. Max Pilley speaks to the beloved Australian songwriter as she prepares for a bold new chapter. Photography by Pooneh Ghana

There is a scene in Anonymous Club, Danny Cohen’s 2021 documentary feature film that chronicles Courtney Barnett’s Tell Me How You Really Feel world tour, in which Barnett leaves a voice message for the director during a low emotional moment.

“To be completely honest, I just feel like I’ve let myself down somehow with the release of this album,” she says. “What could’ve been a fantastic conversation around fragility and depression and mental health ended up being swept to the side because I was too scared to talk about anything that’s real or heavy. I get frustrated – why can’t I be a strong and powerful communicator?”

To anyone familiar with the Australian musician’s savantlike ability to find profound meditation within the everyday detritus of our lives, her words are hard to process. Since her emergence a decade ago, Barnett’s songs have offered solace to a disaffected generation, a razor-sharp rejection of the idea that there is something wrong with being uncertain about the direction your life

is taking. For many, listening to Barnett means being seen, and there is no doubting the power of that level of communication.

“I think I’m just hard on myself,” Barnett explains to me from her Joshua Tree desert retreat. “That’s what I picked up on when I watched the film. I’m fucking nasty to myself, you know, horrible. It’s that thing of, you wouldn’t treat anyone else the way that you treat yourself. You wouldn’t talk to a friend like that, but we treat ourselves like monsters sometimes.”

She admits that one upshot of being forced to reflect on her own innermost thoughts is that she now tries to be less consumed by self-doubt, and certainly that is a privilege that she deserves to enjoy.

Barnett released one of the defining debut albums of her era with 2015’s Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit, a searing, scabrous and sardonic record that funnelled lonely, restless 20-something inertia into furious guitar solos

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and laugh-out-loud one-liners (“Gimme all your money, and I’ll make some origami, honey”). 2018’s Tell Me How You Really Feel retained the same qualities, but doubled up as a hand-onthe-shoulder reassurance to her audience that these worries that unite them need not be all-consuming.

The Anonymous Club documentary eventually found Barnett rediscovering her confidence through a series of intimate solo live shows, and she now prepares to release End of the Day, a new album built from the ambient instrumental tracks that Barnett composed with her friend, the Warpaint drummer Stella Mozgawa, to score the film. The record is exquisitely restrained; an exercise in patient, impressionistic contemplation, designed to invite the listener to bring their own context to the table.

“That was one of our main intentions, to not influence the viewer or the listener too much emotionally,” Barnett explains. “I wanted it to sound beautiful and emotional, but not too suggestive.”

For an artist so closely associated with her lyrical voice, it is an interesting excursion for Barnett to express herself in this format. She grew up listening to a lot of classical music with her parents, however, and for years she has filled countless hours of her free time playing extended, meditative ambient guitar jams for her own entertainment. Keith Jarrett’s elegant 1975 jazz piano opus The Köln Concert is just one example of Barnett’s private listening preferences.

“I wasn’t sure what people would say,” she says about End of the Day, “but it’s been nice seeing people who listen to it telling me that they got something really meaningful out of it.

That means a lot to us.”

It’s relatable, I guess Barnett has shown that she is not averse to the odd unexpected career left turn. In 2017, before she had even begun recording her second solo album, she released Lotta Sea Lice, a surprise full-length collaboration with slacker guitar hero Kurt Vile. “I like doing lots of different things,” she says. “It’s nice to break things up and let your brain wander and do something different.

That’s the only way to grow, to break outside what you’re used to. I think I’m just really curious, musically. And I feel like to only allow myself to do one thing is just not going to present an interesting outcome.”

Aside from presenting a new aesthetic side to Courtney Barnett, End of the Day has a poignant significance as it will be the last official release on Milk! Records, the award-winning label founded in 2012 by Barnett and fellow musician and former partner Jen Cloher. By providing a platform for independent artists in Melbourne, including dream-pop songwriter Hachiku and art rockers Jade Imagine, Milk! has been a pillar of the city’s thriving alternative scene since its inception. However, an already challenging financial climate was only exacerbated by the pandemic, and twinned with Barnett’s own semi-permanent move to California, the writing was on the wall.

“I think in the end, it just seemed like the right time to close the label,” she reflects. “It’s not an easy thing to keep

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going. Sometimes you just know in your gut that the time has come to change something, and I think you’ve got to follow that feeling when it happens.”

Several of the scenes in Anonymous Club where Barnett seems at her happiest are when she is in the Milk! headquarters, so it is clear that this is a decision that did not come easily. “I am a very nostalgic person,” she says. “So it’s hard to not cling on to things. Milk! Records has always had such an amazing community of people who are such music lovers, committed to supporting artists and turning up at shows. But it’s good practice in letting go of something and appreciating what it is and what it was, and being grateful for how incredible and life-changing it has been.”

The first ever release on the label was Barnett’s debut EP, I’ve Got a Friend Called Emily Ferris, which, when bundled together with follow-up How to Carve a Carrot Into a Rose, formed the breakthrough release A Sea of Split Peas, a twelve-track 2013 compilation that is now set for a tenth anniversary vinyl re-release.

Included is ‘Avant Gardener’, the song that took Barnett from Australian dive bars to US late night talk shows. Over a bed of strangulated guitars, she tells the story of an asthmatic attack through a prism of jaded, sarcastic malaise, and for the first time, the world hears Barnett’s ability to casually conflate existential despair with offhand flippancy (“I’m breathing but I’m wheezing / Feel like I’m emphysemin’”; “I get adrenaline straight to the heart / I feel like Uma Thurman, post-overdosing kickstart”).

Much like Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig’s classic 2012 film Frances Ha, Barnett’s songs soon became a guiding light for an audience seeking a way to navigate the no man’s land of early adulthood in the 2010s; if she was able to articulate the struggle to resist society’s demands to conform, then at least the rest of us were not alone.

“It’s a funny thing, because a lot of what I was saying in those first few albums was… I was so kind of lost and unsure,” she says. “Having a clear voice and an idea of what I’m saying, sure, but what I’m saying is that I have no idea what I’m saying.

So it’s this weird, slightly meta thing. But even in that, maybe that’s what people connect to, because a lot of us don’t know exactly what we’re thinking or what we’re doing or where we’re going. It’s relatable, I guess.”

Considering how quickly she came flying out of the traps, it appeared from the outside that Barnett had arrived with a fully-formed and somewhat effortless artistic voice, but nothing is as straightforward as it seems.

“There’s always some element of trying to intellectualise it,” she says, pausing to consider how she marries external expectations with her desire to write truthfully. “You know what you should do, or what’s worked before, but what I’ve learned along the way is that there’s no formula. Even when people think there’s a formula, if you follow it, you’re probably going to not be as successful the next time around because it doesn’t come from the same pure place, and you can’t please everybody all the time.

“And so, the only thing to do is to just try to be as honest and real as possible. And you know, even that’s hard because we’re always second guessing ourselves. I’m always second guessing myself. So sometimes, it’s hard to find that place, especially when you know that you’re presenting to a listener. So

“I think I’m just hard on myself.

That’s what I picked up on when I watched the film.

I’m fucking nasty to myself, you know, horrible”

I’m always thinking how someone’s going to hear it and all the different ways that they could interpret something, and I think the only way to get past that is just to really let go of that thought and try to just get on with it.”

Look back with love While preparing material for the upcoming re-release of A Sea of Split Peas, Barnett found herself surprised by how much she enjoyed the indulgence of sifting through her archive of memories. An avid photographer since her childhood, she has literal stashes of film negatives and photobooks from the era, and even if she is still learning to be sufficiently kind to herself in the moment, she is at least able to reflect on her younger self with considerable affection.

“It feels like ten years, but it also feels like thirty years,” she quips. “And I feel like the same person, but totally a different person, and I think that’s a good thing. I think it’s good to recognise your growth as a human. I see my younger, selfish, ignorant parts and it’s nice to hope that you’ve grown and changed. You

can’t be who you are now without having gone through all the things you’ve gone through in your life. It’s about looking back with care and love.”

Barnett’s third album, 2021’s Things Take Time, Take Time was a more tender, pared-back affair, dialling down the laconic lyrics in favour of a more sweetly observational writing style. She has just entered the intense period of writing for album number four, anticipating that she will be “spending months trying to write single lines of lyrics, which is just how I have to do it.”

The impression she gives is that the new material will see her injecting more of the red-blooded intensity of her earlier work back into proceedings, which would only further throw into relief the extent that End of the Day marks a departure from the Courtney Barnett norm. If Anonymous Club captured her at the moment of her lowest self-confidence, then it would appear that being forced to relive that period, creatively, has fuelled her regeneration.

“It’s not the film I would have wanted to make about myself, it’s not the story I would’ve wanted to tell. But even though it was hard to watch, it was a good lesson. It’s a process. I guess I’m just trying not to doubt myself as much now. I feel like over time I’m getting better at learning all these things.”

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Over the last decade, the Nyege Nyege collective have gone from throwing DIY parties in a Kampala film school to becoming a central hub of outsider sound from Africa and far beyond. As they prepare their 2023 festival and an enormous range of new releases on their two record labels, their founders tell Luke Cartledge about the scenes they’re championing, the communities they’re working with and the challenges they’ve faced

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Leaning back in their chairs, periodically filling the laptop camera lens through which we’re speaking with cigarette smoke as they bask in the late afternoon sun, Arlen Dilsizian and Derek Debru almost look like they’re halfway through running a festival already. Relaxed but invigorated; at ease but attentive; a little fried, but tangibly enthused about what they’re doing. Yet their festival, Nyege Nyege, isn’t due to take place for another three months, in the eastern Ugandan city of Jinja. Since its first edition in 2015, Nyege Nyege Festival has become one of Africa’s biggest electronic music events, Dilsizian’s and Debru’s expert curation bringing together a heady mix of local and international artists, many of whom are highly experimental in approach, together in the verdant Ugandan countryside. The founders’ laidback demeanours belie the sheer amount of work – including overcoming some serious challenges in 2022, to which we’ll return later – that it has taken to get the festival to this point, and this flagship event is only one component of what they do as Nyege Nyege.

Dilsizian and Debru moved to Uganda separately in 2011, before meeting shortly afterwards as lecturers at Kampala Film School. Both have cosmopolitan, creative backgrounds: Dilsizian has worked extensively in the music industry, both as a hip hop promoter in his native Greece, and as a tour manager for artists like MF Doom; Debru, who grew up in Belgium, worked in documentary film in India and the Ivory Coast before settling in Uganda. The roots of Nyege Nyege lie in the film

photos courtesy of nyege nyege tapes

Nyege Nyege : ten years of DIY

experimental music in Uganda screenings they began organising together for their students and the surrounding community.

“We used to do these weekly film screenings for the community,” says Dilsizian. “They’d be showing African cinema, African film classics and some leftfield, arthouse cinema. In the back of [the screening venue] there was a small bar, and we started throwing parties every Wednesday after the screening.”

Immediately their parties were warmly received, “started attracting a lot of the neighbourhood”. Living and working in a “very pan-African” district of Kampala, they had a rich blend of musical traditions on their doorstep, and a diverse community which was open to hearing a wealth of different genres. “We started playing a lot of regional sounds,” Dilsizian continues, “and working with a traditional Bagandan [a Ugandan ethnic group] percussion troupe. It was called Boutique Electronique, and it grew popular very fast.”

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HEIR ROLES AT the film school continued to help Dilsizian and Debru to find spaces in which they could work with the community that was blossoming around their parties. The school had recently rented a villa in which they could host their lectures; this soon became a residential space and studio for artists to live and work within, sometimes for months at a time, free of charge.

The more parties they threw, the more artists they invited to the villa, the more they realised that they were providing a space for

sonic experimentation that was difficult to find elsewhere – but that wasn’t something they’d planned on doing to begin with.

“I don’t think we thought about it – it all happened extremely organically,” says Debru. “We were doing these film nights, and at that point I was also learning to DJ along with a couple of people that came through [the parties], and there were a couple local MCs that became mainstays. There was that latent potential that people got drawn into. You have to remember that the club landscape in Kampala was quite homogeneous – you go from club to club, and there might be some Afrobeats or US hip hop, but that’s all that was happening anywhere – that’s what was commercially viable. [Nothing for] the outsiders.”

“There’s a couple of factors at play,” says Dilsizian, picking up the story. “One is that, as opposed to a few other countries on the continent like South Africa, which always had a vibrant electronic scene and was very regionalised – in Durban it was gqom, in Pretoria was limpopo house, in Johannesburg it was more Afro house, in Soweto there’s a whole scene – here was much more uniform. The music industry is very much regulated by a couple of gatekeepers, so it was harder for younger artists to work up than in other places. And two, the artists we were bringing in were people who are active in their own regional scene – [someone like] Otim Alpha would play at weddings and functions in Gulu, his tribal area. There are 51 tribes in Uganda, and people wouldn’t really move around [between them], so we started bringing these

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people into a club context and the audience was really receptive.” Engineering these encounters between different groups and scenes helped them develop their music and reach new listeners; Dilsizian says that, for example, “singeli, from Tanzania, is a scene we were really active in from early on and helped popularise globally.”

As they put together these events and encouraged artists to express themselves using the resources they were able to offer, the duo had to be mindful of the local economy to make their activities as accessible to Kampalans as possible – which in turn had aesthetic effects on the music that was being produced and performed.

“There was no entry fee,” says Debru. “These weren’t necessarily well-off neighbourhoods. We realised that if something was going to be interesting, and inclusive, it had to be extremely affordable – but that’s definitely created that original sort of energy. It’s a 24-hour city, so going out is not a problem – it was more about putting on stuff that wasn’t interesting to any bar, as a lot of the clubs have the same DJs who will play every night for eight hours and keep the crowds going, playing something crowd-pleasing.”

Yet this original iteration of what would become Nyege Nyege was not to last. Kampala was changing, for better and worse. Younger, local promoters were beginning to establish themselves, tapping into some of the audiences that had initially flocked to Boutique Electronique and charging higher entry prices; on both of those counts, Dilsizian and Debru are entirely supportive, delighted to see local people continuing to develop their own scene in this way and aware that their own privileges as academic expats had at least partially allowed them to keep their events so cheap for so long. Meanwhile, the political climate was changing – and not for the last time, the repressive apparatus of the Ugandan state began to impinge on the underground music community that was beginning to flourish in Kampala.

“Kampala has changed quite a lot in the last few years,”

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says Dilsizian, his manner darkening. “The police have become way more intrusive into the nightlife economy. Everything requires a permit now. The politics of the country have changed a lot, ever since the last elections [in 2021, which were plagued by anti-democratic irregularities, and since which the government, already deeply conservative, has become even more authoritarian]. It’s more complicated than before.”

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N 2015, DILSIZIAN and Debru took a significant step and staged the first Nyege Nyege Festival in Jinja (where they are today), and thanks to the residencies they’d been hosting at their villa-cumstudio, a label, Nyege Nyege Tapes, wasn’t far behind. The first festival picked up from where their Kampala parties – which within a couple of years had gone from post-film DIY dances to two-tothree-day raves – had left off, throwing together a mix of experimental and leftfield sounds on the banks of the Nile.

“We put our life savings into it and invited musicians from across the continent to this dilapidated old resort,” says Dilsizian, “and it created this sort of moment in Uganda and East Africa, when people found another way to party.”

The international attention that the festival received naturally exposed Nyege Nyege to a far wider audience than ever before, beyond Uganda and into the consciousness of music nerds the world over (particularly in Europe and North America) opening a potentially lucrative market for the record label they got up and running by 2016.

At this point, I wonder how this made the founders feel, as their idiosyncratic, locally-focused project began to be appreciated – and scrutinised – by listeners with little idea of the reality of life in East Africa, particularly in a context where music that isn’t from the Global North is so frequently exoticised, caricatured or, most frequently, outright ignored.

“From the beginning there was always the idea that if we’re going to do something in music and culture there has to

be an economics behind it, because most of the artists we work with are really economically disenfranchised,” says Debru, seriously now. “If you’re going to do something alternative, how are you going to earn something from it? And it so happened that we did get some initial support from European music listeners and avant-garde programmers – Unsound, CTM – they’ve been really critical.”

“Also,” adds Dilsizian, “this applies to a lot of places in the world. A lot of Chicago artists, for example, the likes of DJ Rashad, played way more in Europe than at home, and to this day have never played in America outside of Chicago, but they’ll get shows in Europe, just because of the economics of performing in this one continent with so many promoters and so much money being pumped into culture. We did a release with DJ K, showcasing this new sound from Heliópolis, a slum in São Paolo. He only used to play in his local favela, but since we did the release a Pitchfork article and DJ Mag feature came out, and he’s now getting booked in middle class, uptown clubs every weekend. So on the one hand, you have that thing where the Western validation also helps push you locally – [gqom pioneer] DJ Lag, for example, only blew up in South Africa after he’d broken through internationally – and then at the same time, when we look at our Bandcamp sales, it’s the UK, America, Germany, Japan: those are the markets where people are willing to pay for music.”

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S THEY TELL their story today, our conversation also touching on the upcoming 2023 festival and their pretty relentless label activities (both with Nyege Nyege Tapes and its recent sister imprint, Hakuna Kulala), they make the growth of Nyege Nyege sound remarkably straightforward. Economic and geographical difficulties needed to be grappled with from time to time, and certain risks may have had to be taken; yet to not only sustain but grow an experimental arts project against the turbulent political and social backdrop of Uganda (or indeed anywhere) in recent years is quite a feat – one that, as of this afternoon, Dilsizian and Debru seem remarkably nonchalant about.

But there have been issues, some of them very serious. In the runup to the 2022 festival, Nyege Nyege became the subject of a moral panic on the part of the conservative right in Uganda, who accused the event of “promoting sexual immorality” and whose advocates in parliament lobbied to have the whole thing cancelled.

As a lively, contemporary festival with attendees from all over the world, it was seen by a certain reactionary bloc as “un-African”, or to use the nakedly homophobic language adopted by former MP Sarah Opendi, as “recruiting” young people into the LGBTQ+ community. As Resident Advisor reported that November, Dilsizian was required to attend “a cabinet meeting with Uganda’s Prime Minister to ensure no orgies, nudity, admission of minors or vulgar expressions would occur” in order for the authorities to allow the festival to go ahead.

The problems with the 2022 festival didn’t end there. As the RA story quoted above details, attendees arrived at the remote site to find that the luxury accommodation that many of them had booked was unfinished and insecure; there was a lack of sufficient security staff; there were sanitation issues; and most troubling of all, there were reports of sexual and physical assault across the

weekend. Many of the problems with the festival infrastructure could be traced back to one man, Arthur Kirunda, to whom the organisers had entrusted several important logistical responsibilities. He turned out to be a complete charlatan.

The aftermath of 2022, and particularly RA’s description of what happened, hit Nyege Nyege hard. Although they don’t dispute that there were serious issues at the 2022 festival, today they’re reluctant to entirely agree with how it’s been portrayed since.

“Nyege Nyege relocated to a new site last year, [which] proved to be too remote, which coupled with intense rain and the government shutdown one week prior to the event created a challenging edition for 2022,” they tell me via a follow-up email.

“The RA article focused primarily on the accommodation hurdles that impacted a small percentage of festival goers. There was zero focus on jobs created, community involvement, the inclusivity, and above all music and performance art and the artists and collectives from all across the continent performing – including many who had left their homes for the first time to perform abroad.”

Again, they’re keen to reiterate their responsibility for the problems that did occur insofar as they’d trusted someone they shouldn’t have, with Debru admitting to RA that “we were foolish…

[Kirunda] hustled us over almost everything”. In their email to me, they expand on how they plan to make amends this year: “The immense challenges and losses we faced initiated a lot of soul searching and called upon our resilience and creativity to face our shortcomings. The safety of festivalgoers and their accommodation are always of paramount importance, and this informed our decision to now hold the festival on a smaller site closer to many accommodation options... moving to a new site this year in partnership with Jinja [in the middle of the city] and not getting tangled up in having to set up camping facilities [with a] lack of reliable service providers.”

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AVING BUILT SUCH a dynamic, inclusive ecosystem for new and experimental music in Uganda over a decade – always, it’s important to underline, in collaboration with the local community, rather than as paternalistic outsiders – it does feel like Nyege Nyege have earned the right to make up for the issues of 2022 (perhaps bracketing the most serious security issues – those involved in the incidents alleged by the RA report shouldn’t be expected to simply move on or approve second chances, but this isn’t the appropriate place for speculation or relitigation on that subject). Nyege Nyege Tapes and Hakuna Kulala are two of the most progressive labels in the world at the moment, giving leftfield voices from the Global South platforms that are very difficult to find elsewhere. Perhaps the most significant testament to the value of what Debru and Dilsizian have built is the new wave of young Kampalan promoters and artists they’ve directly inspired.

“A lot of people that came to the parties eventually started organising their own parties, with most of the artists from the collective,” says Debru, smiling down the camera. “That’s also one of the reasons why we stopped throwing parties [in Kampala] because now other people were throwing them; now you have four or five young Ugandan promoters who promote alternative music. That’s great.”

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Final Third

The Rates: CMAT

Each month we ask an artist or group to share three musicians they think have gone underappreciated and three new names who they hope will avoid a similar fate. This time, Irish songwriter CMAT discusses her selections with Theo Gorst

When CMAT was preparing to release her debut record – last year’s excellent If My Wife New I’d Be Dead – she was filling her weekdays operating a helpline for malfunctioning service station coffee machines. By contrast, when Ciara MaryAlice Thompson and I speak a month before her second LP drops, music is now her full-time occupation and it’s leading to some perplexing globetrotting. Two days before our chat she was in Los Angeles, the next day Macclesfield, the day after it’s the Netherlands, and when we speak she’s in a Brazilian cafe, but that Brazilian cafe in London.

CMAT’s debut record tactfully set the longing of country against the sparkle of electro-pop. She describes her quickfire follow up Crazymad, For Me as “a lot more serious. I don’t really care so much anymore about how something I do is perceived. I know the people who come to my concerts really love it and are really committed.” The response is likely to be equally rapturous though, as early singles ‘Have Fun!’ and ‘Whatever’s Inconvenient’ suggest an expansion as opposed to an evolution of a sound that won so many plaudits and culminated in CMAT winning Ireland’s Choice Music Prize. As

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Final Third she prepares for its release, I spoke to her about six underrated artists who all have informed her sound, starting with her three more established selections.

the songs people love.” She doesn’t get the credit she deserves. Also, she’ll be cantankerous and difficult to deal with in the weeks leading up to a big show and then at the end of it she’ll be like: “Ooh I was being a bit of a bitch wasn’t I?” That’s what separates her from others, her humility.

it. I made peace with the idea of getting someone else to do it, though I really didn’t want to. He’s such a handsome guy, he’s ridiculous looking. I only really work with very handsome people, that’s part of my job.

SHIRLEY BASSEY CMAT: Shirley Bassey calls into question the definition of “underrated”. She’s very known and is a household name and is highly critically acclaimed by some, but bashed by others. I think everything she has gone through and the way she has come up is extremely underrated. Her career as it stands is very unusual so I’m fascinated by her. Obviously I think the best thing about her is her voice and that’s why everybody loves her. My vocal coach produced and co-wrote an album of hers in 2007, which had the P!nk cover ‘Get The Party Started’ on it.

TG: I remember that track being everywhere when I was a kid, but was really surprised to see it only charted at number 47.

CMAT: This is the thing that’s really interesting about her. Live is everything for her and her relationship with live music is the most important thing in the world. The thing that’s interesting about her stardom is that she hasn’t had many songs that have charted, and she hasn’t sold that many records, or at least not as many as you’d think, but she cannot stop selling tickets, especially in America.

The only songs that would have charted might be the James Bond songs she did.

She did that 2007 album [also called Get The Party Started] and apparently she performed the new songs for like two shows, and then said, “I don’t want to do these songs anymore, I want to perform

HUMAN LEAGUE DOTTIE WEST CMAT: She was a country and western singer who would have predated Patsy Cline. She was a very, very early arrival to the country scene. She had that career in the ’50s, then went away, got divorced and came back with this album in 1979 – Special Delivery – which is maybe one of my favourite albums of all time. This album has an amazing song called ‘A Lesson in Leavin’’ on it. It’s been one of the number one albums for my second record. It’s like a country funk record, and is quite a feminist album; her talking about how terrible men are. Especially at that time country did not pander to women’s interests.

TG: She’s also well known for duets, which is something you’ve just done with John Grant on ‘Where Are Your Kids Tonight?’; can you talk about how that came about?

CMAT: I just stalked him for a little while and begged everyone I knew who had anything to do with him to put me in contact… and it worked. From the age of 15 I’ve been so obsessed with his work and really think he’s the best contemporary musician today. Every time I’d meet someone who’s in his band or on his label I’d be like, “Can you tell him to get in touch with me!?” I wrote a song for him, with him in mind, and eventually he agreed to do

CMAT: People really consider them to be one hit wonders and to not be cool or important, or relevant, which is why they’re underrated. I absolutely worship them; I worship the ground [singer] Phil Oakey walks on. This guy was making music with Giorgio Moroder at a pretty early stage, he went to Los Angeles to make music and was just annoyed that they didn’t have any PG Tips. The three of them that are in the band (Oakey, Susan Ann Sulley and Joanne Catherall) have never moved out of Sheffield because they don’t seem to like anywhere else. They’re only interested in making music for the music itself and have a back catalogue that really fucking backs it up, more than people think.

I moved to Manchester a few years ago, and I really wanted to learn about the history of Manchester bands so I tried to get into New Order and Joy Division. I do really like them but there was a level of seriousness to the bands from Northern England in the post-punk or electronic scene that ultimately doesn’t resonate or appeal to me. But when I was in a YouTube wormhole I came across a 20-minute video of Phil Oakey giving out about having to record an album in California and the lack of PG Tips. I found it so endearing as he’s so beautiful and strange looking. He’s dressed like all the fancy New Romantics of the time but is just some bloke.

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Final Third

TOM ASPAUL CMAT: He’s my favourite person in the world. End of. He’s the best – the best songwriter I know and he has something a lot of much more widely known musicians lack – I don’t really understand why the build has been so slow. When I first heard his debut album [Black Country Disco] I thought it was the best pop album I’d heard all year. But I think it’s started to go for him now a bit. He did a lot of songwriting for others [Kylie, Celeste, AlunaGeorge] but has stopped that to focus on his own project, which is great as a clarity of vision comes from working on your own stuff, and I think that’s really clear in what he does. I know what his next album is going to be and it sounds fucking incredible. He’s such an artist and I like that he’s working in such a commercial medium but doing something in such an uncommercial way.

than usual, and I came across a load of music that way as I will listen to everyone who applies. Emily Nenni applied and I said yes, but in the interim period she’d booked a gig, which I was quite upset about as I wanted to see her live. Anyway, I got into her music and she’s just great.

She was supposed to come to the UK this year but had to cancel because of visa money issues. Hopefully I’ll see her soon.

She’s got this song ‘Messin’ With Me’ which is amazing. She’s basically threatening to beat somebody up if they keep harassing women. It’s great!

TG: With your love of country, playing in Nashville must have been a big deal. Did the city itself live up to your expectations?

CMAT: I was really worried. My number one concern was that I’d be disappointed by it, especially after I’d named the lead song on my debut album about it. I’d really tied myself to the city and was so worried it’d be shit, but it was fucking amazing.

Within five minutes of landing I was in a bar and these girls came up to me and said: “We’ve closed our shop that we work in – in North Carolina – for four days in order to drive ten hours here to your show.

So please let us buy you a drink.” I said “absolutely”, and ended up getting shitfaced with them, not getting home till five in the morning.

TINASHE EMILY NENNI CMAT: I played a show in Nashville, and as with a lot of shows, people go through the promoter applying to be my support.

Generally, you get a couple, but for this Nashville show it was three times more

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CMAT: She should probably be the most famous person on the planet. She’s so insanely talented, but it never really broke for her. I would argue the reason for that was being on a major label and doing the major label thing. She’s independent now and the first LP she released as an

indie artist was Songs For You, which is amazing, it’s so imaginative and creative.

It’s wildly good to listen to and is groundbreaking production wise. There’s a thing with Tinashe that I’ve realised as a super fan – I’m five minutes away from starting a Tinashe fan club – where she does something and a year and half later there’ll be a carbon copy of what she’s done in the Korean music scene.

TG: I’m sure you’re aware of her collaboration with Charli XCX and Ty Dolla $ign from a few years ago?

CMAT: I remember when that song, ‘Drop That Kitty’, came out. I remember the exact day which makes me feel very old now. I was into Tinashe before I was into Charli but Charli has since become a massive factor in my life. Ty Dolla $ign not so much.

TG: Would you mind talking about how Charli XCX became a massive factor in your life?

CMAT: I got to go to a listening workshop with a group of fans and we heard her unreleased music. All the fans were mostly being really positive. Realistically, I was nobody; I wasn’t working as a musician at that time, I was working at TK Maxx and I shouldn’t have said anything.

But I was really critical of the music. I remember she played ‘Focus’ for the first time and I thought, “That’s fucking brilliant.” She then played this one song – which I will not name, as it’s become quite a big hit for her – but I said, “This song is not good and you should not release it.

Specifically, it sounds like and reminds me of another artist who is releasing music at the minute, and it feels like it’s capitalising off of that trend, so it’s beneath you.

You’re an innovator and a really brilliant songwriter!”

She spoke to me afterwards; she was very confused about why I was there. She said, “What are you doing?

You’ve obviously got a good ear and know stuff about music but you’re not doing anything. That confuses me because you’re talented.” She told me I either needed to move to London or go back to Dublin and be around friends and people I made music with. It was probably the most important thing to happen to me ever.

Final Third

In Conversation: Wilco and Cate Le Bon

20 years on from the innovations of their early2000s masterpieces, Wilco enlisted art-pop auteur Cate Le Bon to help them take their next step forward. The result, Cousin, is their most adventurous album in well over a decade. Sam Walton spoke with Le Bon and Wilco leader Jeff Tweedy about their unique collaboration

In rock’s recent past, the producer as provocateur-confronter has cast a long shadow. BJ Burton tore up Low’s playbook magnificently for their final two albums; before that, Richard Russell carved a niche re-tricking old dogs in the form of Gil Scott Heron and Bobby Womack. Even the end of Blur’s first run was characterised by deliberate production mismatches fluctuating between the sublime (William Orbit’s sprawling abstractions on 13) to the plain embarrassing (let’s all try and forget Fatboy Slim’s ‘Crazy Beat’, yeah?).

The most elegant producer-led transformation of the past 25 years, though, must be that of Wilco, who morphed over the turn of the century from loveably scratchy alt-country to electrifying experimental kraut-drone-noise-rock tumult with the arrival of sonic maverick Jim O’Rourke, whose co-productions of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and A Ghost Is Born created a pair of postmillennial totems.

Since the latter, though, Wilco have not looked outside their inner circle for production expertise. Although it’s perhaps too reductive to imply that that closing-in is evident from the seven albums that have followed – plenty of highlights pepper those records, and Ode To Joy in particular was as the title suggests – but a whiff of the comfort zone has nonetheless started to hover over the recent output of a band once known for their creative restlessness.

That, however, has all changed with the arrival of Cousin, with Jeff Tweedy inviting Welsh musician and producer Cate Le Bon to be the first outsider to steer the band through an album since O’Rourke in 2004. Le Bon’s influence is immediate: warped-tape timbres instantly intrigue, Tweedy’s beautiful melo-

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dies soar through thickets of taut percussion, and by the record’s end there’s a strong suspicion that Le Bon’s audible input might just have helped by far the most musically accomplished line-up of Wilco make the album you always knew they could.

The result is the band’s best release since Ghost, and there’s a subtext that Tweedy perhaps recognises that too. While politely (and understandably) resistant to discussing past Wilco triumphs, at one stage in our conversation he acknowledges the desire on Cousin to “aim higher” than usual, a quality that Le Bon – blithe, unflappable, and unfailingly humble throughout our hour-long three-way chat – appears to have triggered in him perfectly. Before getting into the nuts and bolts of making Cousin itself, though, we started by defining our terms.

SW: What makes a good producer?

JT: I don’t know if I’m a good producer, but I’m a different type of producer from Cate. Cate’s role on Cousin was different from what any artist has asked of me. I generally try to make people comfortable to do what they want to do, and I’m pretty hands-off about shaping the record, but when I asked Cate to work on the record with Wilco I was hoping she’d be more involved in the shaping and arranging. But both approaches can be useful. Certainly with the people I’ve worked with, it’s helpful to have somebody make practical things easier – when you’re worried about a lot of things, having someone else to worry about them for you can be great.

CLB: Yes, it’s a nebulous role, isn’t it, but also an incredible thing when you’re working with people you chime with, when

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JT:

there’s all this forward motion and curiosity is leading.

Then, it’s a really beautiful relationship, between producer and artist. But every production role I’ve had has been different: the line where artist and producer meet is always moving, but knowing what it’s like on both sides is a huge benefit to walking that line well.

It’s a collaboration, right? And like all collaborations, it means different things when you put different people together. Like, Wilco wasn’t looking for any old producer – there wasn’t a list of names – I wanted to work with Cate.

The decision was really inspired by getting to know Cate and having an instinct that it would feel really good to combine our sensibilities and see what happened.

SW: How did you two meet?

JT: I heard [Le Bon’s 2013 album] Mug Museum and was a fan immediately. Then these days, what normally happens if I’m a fan of something is that Wilco has this festival, Solid Sound, where we invite people we like and want to spend time with, which expands our world a little bit, and hopefully we share our audience with those people, and that’s a lovely thing we get to do. Cate was invited and I sent out an email like I always do to see if any of the bands that were coming wanted to collaborate or sit in on any songs or anything like that. Cate was the first person to respond, so we hit it off.

CLB: My parents were both huge Wilco fans so I listened to

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Final Third Wilco as a teenager. Then one day my dad emailed me to say that Jeff had written something in Pitchfork about Mug Museum and it blew my father’s mind. After that, we slowly started to move in similar circles.

JT: We just found ourselves becoming friends in an inexplicably fast way – there’s a sense of familiarity that I don’t know how to account for. Maybe there’s some sort of ancestral memory, or maybe that’s how friendships work when you can be years apart, and the next time you see each other it can be just like the day before.

SW: Why did you decide to work together now?

JT: It was really the material that made me think of Cate. There were some songs I had written in this batch that were my attempts to write a Cate Le Bon song – like, not aiming right at it, but I could hear things in my songwriting that I felt were responding to the challenge of Cate’s material, and I think that’s a healthy way to look at it. I was looking for music that issued a challenge for me to aim higher than I would when I was just going with my usual approach.

SW: What made you want to aim higher than usual on this record?

JT: I think I try really hard every time – it’s built into how I make records. It was more that this material kept my mind coming back to the notion of working with Cate, and I kept thinking that it would be really helpful to me to have her sensibility on board and have someone keep my eye on the important things, because you can get really overwhelmed, especially on this record: there were 30 or 40 songs going into it, so just that alone was hard for me to sort through.

SW: Is that where you came in, Cate?

CLB: Well before that, actually: Jeff was kind enough to let us rehearse at The Loft for our Chicago Pitchfork show.

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During that, he took me aside and said, “Can I ask you something?”, and I assumed it would be. “What do you want for lunch?” or whatever, but he said, “Will you produce the next Wilco record?”, and I was so caught offguard that I just welled up! It was an obvious yes, and then we just went about our business for the rest of the day.

Then once that surreal moment had dissipated, we spoke about what Jeff wanted from me in the producer role, and Jeff sent 30 or 40 songs. I picked the ones that resonated with me, and which I thought would make a nice shape of a record. I tried to be very instinctive about that – if I found myself singing one of them, that was a good sign – but it was pretty tough whittling it down to the 14 to actually go and work on.

The funny thing was, though, that when he asked, I said of course, and gave Jeff a big hug, and then Jeff said, “It’s okay, you can text your dad!”

JT: That’s what gave me the confidence to ask, actually – I thought that there was no way that Cate’s dad was going to let her say no!

SW: The more you talk about this, it sounds like a marriage proposal…

JT: Well, there is something inherently intimate about making music with your friends: it requires a certain consideration of compatibility, and things you don’t have in a lot of other types of relationship. Like, you know that if you’re going to make a whole record together, you’re going to have to go through some ups and downs – it is like for better or worse – it’s an intense relationship.

CLB: That’s true, but it also felt we were always on the same trajectory, which is an anomaly for me.

JT: Yeah, and me too. But I think all we’re trying to get at is that it really worked – there was immediate and natural rapport

Final Third that in other circumstances you have to force yourself to find, which causes friction and ends up at a dead end. That being said, not all discussions with Cate were easy…

CLB: But my job was to be honest! Obviously, that can be quite a trepidatious path: often, when people ask you to come in as a producer and change things up, you do that and they go, “What the hell are you doing!?” But Jeff was incredible at going, “Yes this is what I asked for!” He has a great mind for going, “Sure, let’s see where this goes…”

JT: My first reaction when I was discomforted by something Cate suggested was that this was exactly why we’re working together! If we were just going to agree on everything, there’d be no point Cate being here. I’ve made so

“I thought that there was no way that Cate’s dad was going to let her say no!” many records by myself up at the studio completely in my comfort zone with engineers who know my instincts, and in a healthy way want to anticipate and facilitate them. But it’s a waste of Cate Le Bon if you don’t let Cate Le Bon say that Cate Le Bon is the way to go!

SW: How do you think the records you’ve made with an external producer differ from those you’ve self-produced?

JT: Just to be clear, I really don’t know how to judge final product against any other final product – and it’s not my job to do that either. I never think about the old albums.

I’ve actually worked hard to try and avoid doing that, which is why the process changes so much from record to record – I don’t trust that I would be happy doing the same thing again and again.

CLB: And I liked that, going in. It was quite freeing: there was no set formula, I think, because Wilco have made records in so many different ways. On all those old records, the band is there, Jeff runs through them, and they’re here now too, so it’s really about looking forward and enjoying the moment.

So there was never any looking back, but there wasn’t really any looking forward either to the finish line, talking about what the record was going to be, until we were there.

It was about being in the moment and being curious, and letting everything be a possibility until it wasn’t. And I think that’s why Jeff doesn’t really repeat himself, and why all his records sound different, but they all sound like Wilco.

JT: I think that’s why I love making records, because at the end of the process, if I’ve done it in a way that’s honest and meaningful, I’ll have a record to listen to that’s not like any other record I’ve got, and I love listening to the music that I’ve made. Driving around for months listening to this record was really a joy, because every time you’re aiming for this feeling of not just “How did I do that?”, but “How

did we do that?”, and not really knowing how it all comes to that point where you feel excited by it. I mean, that’s an incredibly powerful thing to get to conjure up for yourself, and it’s the only thing that I trust as being of value. What gives me the confidence that what I’m putting into the world has any value at all is that it’s worked some magic on me first.

SW: Can you imagine future Wilco records being influenced by how Cousin came together? Might you make another Wilco record together?

JT: I like to think that there’s some shared music in our future, because I like spending time with Cate and making music with Cate, and so I hope that happens again. But the joyous thing about it is that when it does, I don’t know that it’ll be anything foreseeable.

CLB: I feel like Jeff is now a friend, so there’s no urgency, or feeling that I have to hold onto this thing, because as long as we’re both making music, our paths will cross.

I’m making a record at the moment, and almost every day I think about something Jeff has said, or his reaction to something, or wonder what Jeff would do, so for me it’s a beautiful organic thing that will continue to blossom from time to time. I feel like we’ll always be thinking or talking about making something together.

JT: I love the idea of getting better, and I love the idea that working with Cate helped me get better, and will continue to get better in the same way that she’s describing working on her new record right now. That’s how it’s supposed to work – it should be an acknowledged condition that you’re never just yourself, and part of ‘being yourself’ is about embracing the influence of the people you care about.

You’re not ever just yourself.

SW: Has Cousin whetted your appetite for working with new people? Has it made you want to broaden your collaborative scope?

CLB: I’ve been thinking about this a lot actually – on my record before last [Reward, 2019], I had quite a bad experience with the people I was working with, and I think on Pompeii [2022] I just shut that side of things down and did almost everything myself to keep it low-risk. But working with Jeff, feeling that real camaraderie and the joy of working with like-minded people has made me readdress how I’m making this current record, and I’ve invited more people into the fold than I was initially planning, tried to do things differently and be a bit braver and more uncomfortable.

Jeff made me realise that there’s nothing better than being in a room with your friend making music and laughing, so that’s reignited things for me.

JT: For Wilco, I generally am happy to be around artists that I like and play together, and I don’t think I’ve ever not had that desire. But this collaborative impulse we’ve been discussing here was unique to Cate, so working with her hasn’t made me go, “Gosh I want to work with just whoever”, because whoever isn’t Cate!

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Final Third

My Place: Jaakko Eino Kalevi

The Finnish musician welcomes us into his Athens home, full of the antique gear that gives his synth jams their unique, layered sound,

by Colin Groundwater

Someone is hawking fruit through a megaphone on the street outside Jaakko Eino Kalevi’s flat. It’s a hot day in Athens, but the Finnish musician closes the window with an apology. We need a little more quiet to talk about his new album, Chaos Magic, and the home studio where it was born.

Kalevi is Finland’s finest pop auteur, a veteran musician and David Byrne collaborator who writes freaky ditties and synth jams reminiscent of Ariel Pink. Chaos Magic is his seventh record, and his first created in his adopted home of Athens. He first visited the city a decade ago to visit a friend, then made annual trips until he moved there full-time from Berlin at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. The weather was nicer, the people were friendly, and, most importantly, he would be close to Mutual Sound Studios, an arts workshop and recording space run by his friend Teemu Takatalo.

Kalevi recorded the album at Mutual Sound, but he wrote most of it at home, where he keeps an array of instruments and equipment for playing around and sketching out ideas. When he moved in he had to repaint and pick through the furniture of the last tenant. He transformed the space into his private synth temple. He likes to encircle himself with instruments and try out different sounds and filters, layering them on top of each other until he finds the perfect tone. It can be a long process. “With the synthesiz-

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ers, I feel like I need to take my own time. It would be too annoying for someone to sit in the studio and press REC,” Kalevi says with a laugh.

Chaos Magic is Kalevi’s most collaborative album to date, with contributions from old friends and new. There are stalwarts from his time in Berlin, acclaimed Finnish jazz musicians, even the actress Alma Jodorowsky, granddaughter of the legendary director Alejandro. Kalevi met her when he was DJing at a bar in Athens one night, and she ended up singing on three tracks. The resulting record is Kalevi’s most expansive record yet, one that slips between languages and genres with ease.

That eclecticism may have informed the album, which Kalevi plucked from a fantasy television show that he can barely remember at this point. “The TV show was not so special,” he says. (If I had to guess, it was probably Netflix’s troubled Witcher series). Chaos magic is a concept from modern occultism with roots that go back to Aleister Crowley. None of that really matters to Kalevi, though, who just liked the vibe of the phrase: “It spoke to me, the combination of words.”

He welcomed us to his home in Athens to check out his gear, tour souvenirs he picked up from around the world and a unique pair of snakeskin shoes. It makes for a motley mood board of music and new age ephemera befitting the freakiest Finn in pop.

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01 KORG POLYSIX I use this a lot. It’s my favorite synth and the one I use the most on the new album. I use it for everything, for bass, for strings.

And I like to layer – you find one nice sound, then you play the same thing on top of it with a different sound to create an effect. I’ll set everything in my living room and tweak the sounds for hours. It’s on

photography by maria siorba

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every song, but on ‘Dino’s Deo’, the solo is crazy and it’s very synthy. I wrote the solo in Midi, but then I played it with different sounds and filters [on the Polysix].

02 REVOX REEL-TO-REEL MACHINE This is for my home production unit. It isn’t actually on the new record – we mixed all of that in the studio. I heard about it from

my friend Dennis, who makes music as CV Vision, and I found it when I was living in Berlin. The eBay classified, that’s the best for used gear in Germany. I drove to the border of Belgium to get this from one guy, it was like 1000 kilometres.

I usually record directly to a computer, then I use this for re-amping.

It’s the best for drums, but sometimes I just do everything. It adds tape compression and warmth. It’s nice that it’s a physi-

cal process. Like with a picture, you might print it out and scan it again to add texture, or just the way a film camera adds some grain – this does the same, but for sound.

03 FABRIC ART This is a fabric I bought from a flea market in Egypt. It’s a black haired lady drinking

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“In Greece there’s more summer than in Finland, but in Finland the summer is so short that everyone goes crazy”

wine and then the white cat is watching, like “What are you doing?”

I’ve played in Egypt twice, once in Cairo and once on the coast, a festival at Almaza Beach [Shorelines Festival]. The flea market was in Cairo. It’s an impressive city. The traffic is crazy, even crossing the street is mad. It’s kind of apocalyptic.

04 TOUR SOUVENIRS There’s an owl and Eiffel tower. The owl was a birthday present from my manager, it’s a craft from Poland. The Eiffel Tower is just a souvenir from Paris. Then on the right side, I have some maracas –I don’t know where from – and a skull from Mexico and a sphinx from Egypt.

05 MOOMIN SUMMER MADNESS POSTER I got this from a Moomin store in Helsinki.

Moomin is an old Finnish cartoon by Tove Jansson – maybe the most famous franchise from it is this anime TV show. That’s the most familiar for me. I like Moomin Summer Madness. In Greece there’s more

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summer than in Finland, but in Finland the summer is so short that everyone goes crazy. Whenever there’s sun, you have to go out and do all the crazy stuff at once.

I watched it as a child – everyone does – but it’s not only for kids. Sometimes it’s good comfort material, good for hangovers. The Moomin world is very understanding. In every episode some crazy stuff is happening, but they sort it out in a very gentle way. They don’t leave anyone out and everyone in the Moomin valley is welcome [laughs].

06 URALKIT PREAMP This is a preamp that I also used on almost everything on the album. Before this album I didn’t really believe in preamps, but now I’ve woken up. Because of the studio, I could do A/B tests [to hear the difference]. The tube drive thing on this makes a fuller sound and lets you find the sweet spot.

This preamp was inspired by the ’60s Abbey Road console. My friend in Finland has this company, Uraltone, for music gear, mostly guitar pedals and amps. I suggested to him that it would be

cool to have a preamp based on Abbey Road. It has the sound and the schematics from the console, which are now open for everyone to see.

He designed it as a kit, so I had to solder it together – I studied to be an electrician when I was young, and so simple stuff I can do. Now it’s a commercial product that you can buy from the site. I was impressed that he took the inspiration from me and now it’s a real product.

07 CE N’EST Q’UN DEBUT – ALEXANDER ROBOTNICK I love Alexander Robotnik. I randomly bought a record by him years ago in Finland. The guy in the record shop recommended him for me. It’s kind of electro. He’s an Italian guy and I heard he lives in Tuscany. Last time I was in Italy I was in Tuscany, and I wrote to him, but he never got back to me.

08 GRAVITY BOOTS Gravity boots are like a medical thing.

Agent Cooper uses them in Twin Peaks.

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My friend in Berlin had them and we were trying them at an afterparty. You hang free with them from a bar, it’s good for your back. Your spine straightens naturally from the gravity, it’s good for your posture and everything. You can’t hang for so long because the blood rushes to your head, but you hang for a few minutes, maybe five or ten.

09 SNAKESKIN SHOES These are from a shoe shop in Berlin.

They were so funny to me, because, what even is that? Some kind of snakeskin?

But with the coloring of a Dalmatian or a zebra? Zebra snake? They’re genuine zebra snake leather!

10 SCORPION This is from Mexico, actually. It’s a real scorpion. There’s a chaotic flea market in Mexico City. I went alone and had a hard time finding it. It’s one of those markets where people just put stuff on the ground. Someone told me, “You can find anything, even like the skull of a baby

crocodile.” Then I saw the skull of a baby crocodile! I didn’t buy it.

Because I had a hard time finding the place, I started to drink. I’d stop in a place, thinking maybe it’s there, and when I finally got there, I was a little bit drunk. It was great, because I ended up buying so much.

11 BRACO THE GAZER PORTRAIT Braco is a Croatian healer. He has a kind of church in Zagreb. I can’t remember where I heard about him the first time, but he’s a funny character. He heals people by looking at them – he’s “Braco the Gazer.”

He has sessions online where he looks at you with his compassionate face through the screen, and you feel better. I once went to his session in Finland at a new age fair. They showed a 20-minute documentary about how great he is, and some guys on stage talked about how great he is. He never speaks publicly. There was some cheesy classical music and then he walked to the stage and scanned people for five minutes and left. To be honest, I didn’t feel such a difference, but it was a nice experience.

I just printed this picture from online. It doesn’t have to be such a strong effect, but it’s warm, enjoyable, compassionate, like, “It’s okay.”

I heard from a Croatian friend of mine that there’s a rumor that he killed his master, who was the other Gazer before him, in Africa, apparently. The master only did one-to-one gazing, but Braco does entire audiences. Maybe there was some kind of fight between the two schools.

12 MAPS I enjoy looking at maps. I’ve travelled quite a lot, so it’s nice to see where you’ve been. The names are pretty funny, like, “Europe Political Map.” These are pretty old, so the borders and places aren’t so accurate. Like the Soviet Union is still there. The big map is “World Map with Physical Relief.” I don’t know what physical relief means, but it has it. And the small one is a Greek railroad map. I think it’s accurate because they haven’t built much more. But the southern ones aren’t in use so much because they’re not maintained.

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Ringo Starr has been in the EP game for the last two years, having decided – quite rightly – that no new record needs to be longer than 4 songs, and that perhaps he should only write one of those songs himself… with a co-writer. In a world of hyper-productivity, I massively rate Ringo’s ‘that’ll do’ spirit, which he’s taken to bold new frontiers of give-a-fuck over his last 4 releases. His latest is called Rewind Forward, which means absolutely nothing, but sees the mercury in his effort-ometer whizz past the title of his previous, third EP, which was called EP 3. Nice one, Ringo!

The cover though, is another story – the first time that Ringo has been bold enough to simply use an Instagram filter to create his artwork. One of the first filters you come to; near the dog ears and the one that makes your eyes big. Needless to say the result is astounding… ly… shit. And therefore completely excellent. Peak Ringo. And – intentionally or not – the most punk sleeve of 2023.

Ringo has clearly been so pleased with this life hack that he’s not remotely bothered about how his right ear looks like a fake, giant ear from a fancy dress shop. “But the filter has duplicated it 9 times, Ringo!”. “Oh yeah! ... But it’s done now, and I’d have to open the app again.” Ringo doesn’t sweat the small stuff, like an EP sleeve that will exist forever – the guy’s still wearing a Make Trade Fair band!

I can’t wait to see what he does next, and how he’ll top this. But I’ve got a feeling his next EP will be called Rewind Forward and feature 10 Ringo Starrs doing a peace sign in a red jacket. Or no sleeve at all.

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When Family Guy creator and famous festival con man Billy McFarland announced the return of FYRE festival last month, music fans were so outraged they bought tickets to his next Netflix disaster story in record time. Sources now suggest that FYRE 2 might in fact be a huge success compared to its ill-fated debut. A former cellmate of McFarland’s was allegedly overheard saying how his old prison pal would often ask him for input on “luxury decisions”, like the flavour of crisps that will be included in VIP welcome packs.

“I don’t want to say too much,” said the bunk buddy, “but I think fans of egg will agree that their money has been spent wisely.” Blink 182 are expected to headline.

A woman pointing at a bank statement

illustration by kate prior

CLUB.THE.MAMMOTH. PRESENTS LORELLE MEETS THE OBSOLETE

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ELECTRONIC MUSIC FROM INDIA 1969-1972

THE NID TAPES

Uncovered at the archives of the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad from previously unknown Indian composers: Gita Sarabhai, I.S. Mathur, Atul Desai, S.C. Shama & Jinraj Joshipura.

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Out 27th October